As Miloš Turinski from the employment platform Poslovi Infostud said, the entire need to import labor comes from the fact that we have become a labor market deficit.
“Except for the deficit that is talked about every day, which concerns the deficit in the IT market, we have had a deficit since the pandemic. We are talking about the field of trades, but there are also profiles that are less qualified. This caused the first surge of labor imports that year strength,” explains Turinski.
In order for the country to import a certain number of workers, he says, it must have a proven deficit in the market in that area.
“Thus, in the first wave, during the period of the coronavirus, we had the import of labor that filled our service activities, such as delivery and courier services. These were people who came from Uzbekistan with the aim of filling certain jobs. After that, when the rush of imports started, it further heated up in the field of construction, where we have the biggest deficit”. As for the construction workers, they come to us from all over, Turinski is honest.
“That’s where we have the biggest influx of people from India, Turkey, China. In some rare cases, we also find people from other countries. Then it spread to basic activities, so we had a case of bringing in about 30 workers from Sri Lanka who now drive our public transport. However, it is still insufficient, considering that they lack 300 drivers”.
Serbia also imports workers for production, but also for the jobs of hygienists, i.e. cleaners.
“Where we know for sure that people are coming are production workers, they are coming from Sri Lanka, and from 2022, we have information that people are coming from Nepal to perform our hygienist jobs. These are the categories of jobs that people are engaged in and these are the countries we import them from there”.
Why do we lack our workers?
The question of why we lack people and why they come to us from the outside bothers a large number of Serbian citizens. As Turinski tells it, there are three problems.
“The first is that for the last couple of decades, we have had a very large number of professional people who are going west. We have a very large number of professional people who are leaving, and that is a fact. On the other hand, our labor market lacks a large number of people, which further means that we don’t have the staff to fill those jobs. We also have a very big problem with young people, in the sense that they don’t want to do jobs, they don’t want to be educated for them at all.
The third problem is that those qualified staff that remain in our labor market is insufficient for our needs and then we have an increase in the price of a service or an appointment that we did not have before, a guy, a painter, a car mechanic. Firstly, it is very difficult to find a worker, secondly, the price of the service has jumped because that is what the law of supply and demand dictates.” says our interlocutor.
Although many who live and work in Serbia have a big question about why people come to Serbia, Turinski has a clear answer.
“What Germany is to Serbia, so Serbia is to some west. Certainly, all these people who come here, better conditions await them here, and much better earnings”. On this occasion, Turinski referred to the new Law on Employment of Foreigners.
“A few days ago, we had a law that will facilitate immigration and the employment of foreigners. We can guess somewhere that perhaps those workers would most like to come to EU countries, but their path is much more difficult than to get here”.
By the end of the year, 50,000 foreign workers will come to us…
What is worrying is the data from the National Health Service, which shows that the number of foreigners coming to Serbia is growing rapidly. As shown by these data, when talking about foreigners who are here legally, 35,000 people came to Serbia during the whole of last year, while 30,000 people came so far this year.
How do we fix the situation?
What we have to do in order to improve this situation is to start from education and promotion of low-skilled and craft occupations among children and their parents.
“These are all occupations that have been pushed to the background for decades, that they are hard physical jobs, low paid and valued, but also dirty jobs. However, those jobs came to the fore in 2015 in terms of demand. We have the information that more people are wanted with a secondary vocational education, than with a university degree or higher. We have to make people aware that these are jobs that can bring employment and good earnings. We have a situation where our schools are closing majors because there are not enough interested young people to learn those trades. Without that, the problem will get bigger and bigger,” concludes Turinski.
