No work please, we’re British
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We almost spilled our pints upon reading comments Neeraj Kanwar allegedly made about British workers. In news now reported by numerous media sites, Daily Mail associate city editor John-Paul Ford Rojas quotes the vice-chairman and managing director of Apollo Tyres Ltd. as saying employees in the UK “hardly work,” preferring instead to “go to the pub.”
This affinity for the convivial local hasn’t stopped Apollo Tyres – the 13th largest tyre maker in the world – from establishing a small team in the UK as well as a Digital Innovation Centre (DIC) in London, which it set up with a £5 million investment in partnership with Glasgow University. A year ago, the Top Employer Institute even certified the tyre maker as one of the Top Employers in the UK after an in-depth survey of its local workforce.
Small UK team
Apollo Tyres’ UK team works in areas such as finance, digital and US trade growth. But it manufactures tyres elsewhere, operating five factories in India as well as a modern facility in Hungary and a plant in the Netherlands that the company gained as part of its acquisition of Vredestein in 2009. It appears highly unlikely that Apollo Tyres would choose the UK to host an eighth facility, as Mr Ford Rojas quotes Neeraj Kanwar as saying “there’s no incentive to go into the UK.”
Regarding Apollo Tyres’ decision to build a manufacturing facility in Hungary, Kanwar adds: “Hungary gave us incentives, the cost of labour is much more competitive and then the cost of production becomes much more easy. And you know how the workforce in the UK is. They hardly work – they go to the pub.”
With the average price of a pint of beer in the UK (£4.03 as of 2022, according to the British Beer and Pub Association) higher than Hungary’s HUF 1,534 (£3.40) hourly minimum wage, Neeraj Kanwar would be forgiven for considering gastronomy a more viable pastime in the UK than tyre making. This is indeed the case – in addition to his role of vice-chairman and managing director of Apollo Tyres, Kanwar is also part-owner of Scalini, an Italian restaurant based in the affluent London district of Chelsea. Scalini also operates locations in Dubai, Doha, Cannes, Istanbul, Bahrain and Cairo.
Although Ford Rojas notes that Kanwar meant his remark about UK workers as a “quip,” the vice-chairman and managing director of Apollo Tyres nonetheless expresses his point of view clearly: “I think because of government policies, people can sit home and get pensions and they don’t need to work, and that’s a big policy issue.”
National stereotype
John-Paul Ford Rojas’ article also includes a rebuttal by economist John Philpott, founder of The Jobs Economist consultancy. Philpott describes Neeraj Kanwar’s comments as “crude national stereotyping that would be condemned if made by a British employer about workers overseas.” He rejects the notion that people in the UK turn down jobs because of the availability of benefits. “Indeed, one can see from the fact that so many young educated British people end up in less skilled and insecure work in the so-called gig economy that an easy life on benefits spent down the pub is not a widespread preference.”
Tyrepress.com has reached out to Apollo Tyres for comment.
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