My own concern regarding the EU referendum is how far out of the EU is out of the EU. Are we jumping ship for EEA as well? Considering the IPB is currently plowing it’s way through parliament, leaving the EU and the protection of the ECJ is a terrifying enough prospect - I work in IT support and data management and recruitment for the sector has already come to a crashing halt in London - but dropping out of the EEA potential puts us in the position of being unable to store European customer data locally. That’ll hamper our business’s technical ability to simply communicate with European customers, let alone actually do any work for them, and rectifying the problem will not just billions of pounds, but jobs as well in their tens of thousands as domestic out-sourced and cloud-based services like email, storage and comms platforms are shunned in preference to their EU competitors.
Whether or not those concerns are actually based in reality are one thing, but I’ve been unemployed for a while now and spoken with a number of former colleagues, all of whom have said in no uncertain terms that their companies are holding their breath until the whole thing either gets clarified one way or the other, or it blows over. One guy I worked for has preemptively transferred his client’s cloud email services to an EU-based provider after the company’s founder quietly suggested it to him shortly before he sold it.
