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Sponsorship Licences: a viable solution to the workforce shortage in the post-Brexit era.
Since the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union, the nation has been grappling with the challenges of a new immigration system. Consequently, businesses across various industries have faced a significant shortage of skilled labour.
To address this issue, sponsorship licences have emerged as a viable solution. It enables UK firms to attract and retain talented professionals from around the world. In this article, we will explore how sponsorship licences offer a promising path forward to mitigate the workforce shortage in the post-Brexit era.
The Post-Brexit Workforce Shortage
Brexit has led to the end of the free movement of people between the UK and the European Union. For this reason, this change has had a significant impact on the availability of foreign workers in the UK. Which leaves many industries struggling to fill key roles. Correspondingly, sectors such as healthcare, technology, finance, and engineering have been particularly affected by this shortage. To ensure the continued growth and success of these industries, it is imperative to find innovative solutions.
Enter Sponsorship Licences
Sponsorship licences have become a lifeline for UK businesses in need of skilled workers from outside the country. Under the sponsorship system, employers can apply for a licence to sponsor individuals from non-UK and non-European Economic Area (EEA) countries. This allows businesses to recruit talent from a global pool of professionals who possess the necessary skills and expertise.
Benefits For Employers
- Access to a wider talent pool: Sponsorship licences enable UK firms to access a vast international talent pool. Which ensures they can hire the best candidates for their organisations. By removing geographic restrictions, businesses can attract individuals with specialised skills and experience that may not be readily available locally.
- Retaining skilled workers: Sponsorship licences allow businesses to support the long-term residence of foreign employees. Which reduces turnover rates and retaining valuable talent. This stability positively impacts productivity, innovation, and the overall success of the organisation.
- Meeting specific industry needs: Certain industries require specialised skills that may not be adequately fulfilled by the local labour market. Sponsorship licences allow businesses to bridge this gap by recruiting professionals from overseas who possess the desired expertise. Thereby ensuring continued growth and competitiveness.
Benefits For Employees
- Professional opportunities: Sponsorship licences offer individuals the chance to pursue rewarding careers in the UK. Skilled professionals can explore new horizons, gain international experience, and contribute to the growth of UK businesses, all while enjoying the benefits of living and working in a culturally diverse environment.
- Security and stability: The sponsorship system provides foreign workers with greater security and stability. With a sponsorship licence, employees have the reassurance of being employed by an organisation committed to supporting their immigration status, providing peace of mind for themselves and their families.
- Skill development and growth: Working in the UK under a sponsorship licence allows individuals to enhance their skills and professional networks, opening doors to future career opportunities both in the UK and beyond. This exchange of knowledge and expertise contributes to a vibrant and diverse workforce.
Conclusion
In the face of the workforce shortage brought about by Brexit, sponsorship licences have emerged as a viable solution for UK businesses. These licences enable organisations to tap into a global talent pool and attract skilled professionals from around the world. By utilising sponsorship licences, businesses can bridge the skills gap, foster innovation, and maintain their competitiveness in the post-Brexit era.
Moving forward, it is crucial for UK firms to embrace sponsorship licences as an essential component of their talent acquisition and retention strategies. By doing so, they can navigate the challenges of the new immigration system and continue to thrive in an increasingly globalised and interconnected world.
Finally, to find out how we can assist you on all matters relating to Sponsorship Licences and Corporate Immigration. Please contact Jayesh Jethwa to make an appointment.
Sickness Absence: Why You Should Take Your Employees’ Mental Health Seriously.
The impact of work-related stress, burnout, and poor mental health on the UK economy is a significant concern. The latest economic modelling by AXA UK and the Centre of Economic and Business Research reveals that this issue costs the UK economy £28bn per year. This cost is primarily due to the loss of 29.3 million working days from employee sick leave.
These figures highlight the need for employers to be proactive in addressing employee mental health concerns. By recognising early warning signs, employers can promote a culture of openness where employees feel safe to discuss their issues. This not only reduces the likelihood of short term persistent absences or long term sick leave, but it also demonstrates a commitment to employee wellbeing.
Sickness absence can have a considerable impact on a business, affecting productivity and profitability. Therefore, taking immediate steps towards addressing this issue is crucial. Employers of all sizes can benefit from implementing impactful measures to reduce sickness absenteeism in the workplace.
One such measure is providing valuable training to managers. This training can include identifying “red flag” scenarios and teaching managers how to handle them effectively. Additionally, employers can prepare bespoke policies tailored to their working environment, which can help to create a supportive and healthy workplace culture.
Overall, it is clear that addressing work-related stress, burnout, and poor mental health is a vital concern for employers. By taking proactive steps to promote employee wellbeing, businesses can reduce sickness absenteeism and improve productivity and profitability. If you are an employer looking to address this issue, please feel free to get in touch with us for an initial conversation.
Shedding Light on ChatGPT – The Legal Considerations
Love or hate the idea (and many people fall into the latter category), AI language and text to image models have arrived. Now anyone can create prose, programmes, and pictures in mere seconds simply by entering a few instructions on a website. You may be thinking “wonderful, no more dull report and contract writing”. However, there are serious concerns around the accuracy of the information ChatGPT is producing. In addition, the lawsuits by artists, engineers, and other creatives against AI language and art model developers are mounting. There are also potential legal issues for users of ChatGPT, such as copyright infringement and defamation.
Before exploring these legal challenges, it is useful to explain what AI language and art models are. For ease of reference, I will refer to the most well-known, ChatGPT, but the basic principles apply to most other chatbots such as Meta’s Llama, and Google’s Bard.
What Is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT, which stands for “Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer”, was created by Open AI and launched in November 2022. It is considered the most significant technological development since the launch of the Apple iPhone in 2007. It can produce human-like responses to a vast range of questions and is often (but not always) accurate.
ChatGPT works by predicting the next word in a series of words. It is underpinned by an enormous language model, created by Open AI feeding into it some 300 billion words systematically scraped from the internet in the form of books, articles, websites, and blog posts. ChatGPT used the data provided to learn how to predict the next word. Eventually, it became sufficiently trained to produce human-like responses to tasks given to it via the front-end ‘Chat’.
Preston Gralla provided a brilliant analogy for how AI language and text to image models operate in a recent article:
“To do its work, AI needs to constantly ingest data, lots of it. Think of it as the monster plant Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors, constantly crying out “Feed me!”
Open AI and other developers of AI text and image-generating models did not seek permission to use third-party words and art to feed their creations. This fact forms the basis of several class legal actions currently underway around the world.
What Are The Legal Grounds For The Lawsuits Against ChatGPT?
The basis for legal claims against ChatGPT and other language and image-generating models fall into several categories:
- Intellectual property infringement – lawsuits have been launched in several countries, including the UK and US, concerning AI developers scraping content from the internet to train their models without asking permission from the original creators. For example, Stability AI, the London-based company behind the text to image model Stable Diffusion, is being taken to court by Getty Images, which is arguing that Stability AI “unlawfully copied and processed millions of images protected by copyright and the associated metadata” to train Stability Diffusion. There is also a class action lawsuit being brought against several text to image generators, including Stable Diffusion, DeviantArt, and Midjourney, by several US-based artists who claim their original work was scraped from the Internet without permission and used to train a text to image tool.
- Defamation – the mayor of Hepburn Shire, 120km northwest of Melbourne, Australia, at the time of writing was threatening to sue Microsoft for defamation after ChatGPT (which is incorporated into Microsoft’s search engine, Bing), falsely named him as a guilty party in a foreign bribery scandal involving a subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of Australia in the early 2000s.
- Breach of open-source code licences – a class action lawsuit has been brought against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI (and others). The Claimants’ allege that the Defendant’s violated open-source licencing terms and conditions and breached copyright when they used code created by others to build and train Copilot, an AI coding assistant.
- Privacy and data protection breaches – the scraped data used to train ChatGPT scooped up enormous amounts of personal information without the consent of data subjects. Potentially, this breaches privacy and data protection regulations around the world, including the UK and EU GDPR and the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA). On 31 March 2023, Italy’s data regulator, Garante per la Protezione dei Dati Personali, said it would block ChatGPT and investigate whether the AI model complied with the EU GDPR. The watchdog stated no legal foundation to justify “the mass collection and storage of personal data for the purpose of ‘training’ the algorithms underlying the operation of the platform” had been provided. It also voiced concern over the fact that ChatGPT does not verify user’s ages, and therefore “exposes minors to absolutely unsuitable answers compared to their degree of development and awareness”. At the beginning of May, Italy reactivated ChatGPT and said it would carry on its “fact-finding activities regarding OpenAI under the umbrella of the ad-hoc task force that was set up by the European Data Protection Board.”
What Are The Risks For Businesses Using ChatGPT?
Although ChatGPT and its offshoots may seem like a productivity dream come true, caution must be taken when using it to produce written text and images for business purposes. There may be issues concerning copyright and breach of the GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018. In addition, as demonstrated by the defamation lawsuit brought by the mayor of Hepburn Shire, there may be serious legal consequences for organisations if ChatGPT makes mistakes or demonstrates bias, both of which it can do. To avoid potential claims, businesses and individuals must undertake a risk assessment before utilising ChatGPT for particular projects and establish robust due diligence checks on the accuracy and impartiality of the content it produces.
ChatGPT represents an exciting and unknown future for businesses and people alike. To discuss any of the points raised in this article, including undertaking risk assessments, please contact Ann-Maree Blake.