Privately-owned Dutch staffing agency Otto Work Force said it is going to bring cheap Asian labour migrants to Europe to meet staff shortages.

Otto Work Force plans to start bringing in Asian labour migrants this year in Poland, but expects to bring Vietnamese and Filipino workers to the Netherlands and other Western European countries in about seven years.

The company was recently acquired by Japanese staffing firm Outsourcing Inc. for an estimated €66.4 million. Otto Work Force continues to operate as Otto and wants to expand its activities worldwide and thus maintain growth of around 20% per year.

“If the economy continues to grow, we expect that Europe will be short tens of millions of workers from 2030 onwards,” Otto Work Force founder Frank van Gool said.

Van Gool added that Outsourcing has branches in Europe, but they do not yet rely on workers from Asia. "We are going to do that now,” van Gool said. “Before the end of the year we want to bring the first Asian workers to Poland and the first skilled workers to Germany.”

The plan to start with Poland is because, according to van Gool, Eastern European countries are more flexible at giving permits while the Netherlands is much more difficult. He added that Germany is also more flexible, because the shortages there are even more urgent.

Otto supplies workers to the Netherlands and Germany through its recruitment network in Central and Eastern European countries, and has also created a channel for supplying workers from the Ukraine and Moldova to Poland through labour agreements. According to SIA’s report, ‘Largest Staffing Firms in the Netherlands’, Otto was the 11^th largest staffing firm in the Netherlands based on 2016 annual revenue of €189.5 million, a 12% increase over the prior year.