Central Europe Struggles to Square the Circle over Foreign Workers

The problem, however, is already here. The Czech Chamber of Commerce estimates that the domestic labour market is short of about 250,000 people, with a large share of Czech companies citing difficulties finding applicants and new recruits as an obstacle to growth and expansion, or even to sustaining their current operations. “Labour shortages in the Czech Republic are no longer limited to a few specific occupations or sectors. This is a long-term structural problem,” confirms Jan Sotona, spokesman for the Czech Chamber of Commerce. “Domestic labour resources alone are therefore not sufficient to meet the needs of the economy,” he tells BIRN, adding that the importance of foreign workers “will continue to grow as demographic pressures intensify”. This demographic crisis is, of course, not unique to the Czech Republic. Across the border, Slovakia’s low unemployment rate of 4-5 per cent on top of high-qualified workers emigrating from the country and a record low birth rate are putting entire sectors under stress with a chronic shortage of suitable workers and apt candidates. High job vacancy rates are particularly acute for manufacturing positions and factory jobs, but span entire fields of expertise and sectors of the economy, from engineering to logistics, construction, IT or health and social care. Hungary faces similar demographic pressures. Around 75 per cent of its population aged 18-65 is in employment, while unemployment fluctuates between 4.0-4.8 per cent. The country is also losing around 30,000 people from its labour market annually, according to Akos Kalmar, a board member of the Confederation of Hungarian Employers and Industrialists, known as BusinessHungary. Poland’s labour market presents a more complicated picture. Registered unemployment stands at a relatively low 5.8 per cent, but its job vacancy rate is just 0.8 per cent, equivalent to 98,700 vacancies. Those figures might suggest less acute pressure than in its neighbours, but they obscure shortages in particular occupations and regions. Poland’s official occupational barometer forecasts shortages in 17 professions nationwide in 2026, including nurses and midwives, elderly carers, truck and bus drivers, welders and construction workers. “​​There are clearly sectors and jobs in Poland where finding workers is extremely difficult,” says Pawel Kaczmarczyk, an economist and director of the University of Warsaw’s Centre of Migration Research. “And contrary to what one might expect, these are not primarily highly skilled jobs, but lower-skilled services and manual work.” Kaczmarczyk cautions against reading too much into vacancy statistics. “A large share of vacancies are filled without ever reaching the open market,” he says. Poland’s labour market is highly segmented, meaning that unemployed workers in one part of the economy do little to solve shortages elsewhere. The common problem is therefore not simply a lack of people, but a mismatch between the workers available and the jobs employers need to fill. Yet the four countries have taken markedly different approaches to addressing it, particularly when it comes to foreign labour. A waiter carries glasses full of freshly tapped beer during the official reopening of a restaurant garden in the centre of Prague, Czech Republic, 11 May 2020. EPA/MARTIN DIVISEK Changing approaches Czechia is already heavily reliant on foreign workers. At the end of 2025, almost 1 million foreigners were working in the country, which has a population of fewer than 11 million – nearly three times as many as a decade earlier. More than a fifth of employees are not Czech, with the largest groups coming from Ukraine and neighbouring Slovakia. “Without foreign workers, even basic services cannot operate,” Zdenek Zajicek, president of the Czech Chamber of Commerce, has said. An analysis by the Czech National Bank describes foreign workers as “a structurally significant element” of the labour market. They are particularly prominent in manufacturing, construction, transport and logistics, hospitality and healthcare. Despite these numbers, employers say migration is not keeping pace with demand. With the arrival of EU workers such as Romanians, Poles and Bulgarians showing signs of stagnation or even declining, Czechia has increasingly turned to more distant source countries, including the Philippines, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and India. Likewise in Poland, foreign labour has become a much more established feature of its economy, with such workers accounting for 8.2 per cent of everyone registered with the Social Security Office, or ZUS, by the end of June 2026. That amounted to 1.34 million people. For years, Poland relied overwhelmingly on workers from neighbouring Ukraine, many of whom moved back and forth for short periods. Ukrainians remain by far the largest group of foreign workers, accounting for 67.2 per cent of all foreign insurees, followed by Belarusians. But the model has been changing. The shift began before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. By 2018-19, more Ukrainians were seeking to settle in Poland and, as they did, many moved away from the least attractive sectors in which they had first found work. “​​Migrants who integrate successfully sometimes lose interest in the sectors where, paradoxically, they are most needed,” Kaczmarczyk points out. Employers have consequently looked farther afield, including to India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. This growing internationalisation has brought new challenges, particularly in overseeing the agencies and intermediaries that recruit workers from abroad. Slovakia is also increasingly looking to recruit abroad, although still on a much smaller scale. Around 150,000 non-nationals currently work in the country, a record number but only about 6 per cent of the workforce. Three-quarters come from outside the EU, including Ukraine and Serbia, as well as countries in South and Southeast Asia such as Vietnam, the Philippines and Nepal. “Foreigners today are not just a supplement, but an essential part of the [Slovak] labour market,” says Jakub Zagora, an analyst at Kosice IT Valley in eastern Slovakia. He points out, however, that foreign workers remain concentrated around Bratislava and western Slovakia, while demand for workers across the country continues to exceed supply. Hungary, by contrast, has moved to restrict further an already limited part of the workforce on which many employers have come to depend. Currently, around 100,000 guest workers are employed in Hungary, mostly in manufacturing, tourism, construction and agriculture. They account for just 2.4 per cent of the workforce, well below the EU average of 8.3 per cent. Paradoxically, it was Viktor Orban’s anti-immigration government, which ruled for 16 years until April this year, that recognised the labour shortage and introduced a scheme in 2024 allowing temporary employment agencies to recruit workers from selected countries. The government narrowed the scheme in 2025 to three non-Muslim Asian countries, however, and critics argued that the system was too opaque, with 24 different categories under which foreigners could be employed. In its program for April’s election, the then-opposition Tisza party, in a populist pitch for votes, pledged to halt the influx of foreign workers, arguing that they put pressure on the domestic workforce and drive down wages. Among its first measures after taking office, the government in June adopted a legal amendment that closed the door to recruiting and employing up to 35,000 guest workers a year, most of them from the Philippines. The move was welcomed by some sections of society, but economists and entrepreneurs warned that it served political purposes at the expense of the economy. Master Good, one of Hungary’s largest agrifood companies, has a processing plant in Kisvárda, Hungary. Photo: Master Good Politics vs economics That has been a familiar theme across the four countries, where the economic case for foreign labour has not translated into a political consensus for such an influx. Governments and employers might recognise the need for workers, but concerns about wages, competition for jobs and immigration have made recruitment politically contentious. While having to accommodate the “Czech first” stance of its coalition partner, the far-right Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) movement, the ruling ANO party of Prime Minister Andrej Babis has vowed to “look for nurses in Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan” and – more generally speaking – bring in 100,000 qualified foreigners by 2030. “The current 942,000 foreign workers in the Czech Republic are still far below market potential,” ANO stated, with the ruling party planning to reduce the administrative burden, simplify the recognition of foreign diploma and certificates, digitise the entire process, and shorten permit deliveries to 30 days for highly qualified employees and 60 days for medium and low-skilled workers. And while Czech employers and business associations have overall welcomed such plans, they have also warned of the risks to focus solely on high-skilled labour. “Speed and predictability are crucial because Czech companies are competing for skilled workers with companies in Germany, Poland and other European countries,” Sotona of the Czech Chamber of Commerce tells BIRN. “This is not a choice between making better use of domestic labour and labour migration. The Czech Republic needs to do both,” he says. “The objective is not uncontrolled migration, but the opposite: a legal, transparent and predictable system that enables companies to recruit workers whom they objectively cannot find on the domestic labour market.” Across the border, “foreigners today are not just a supplement, but an essential part of the [Slovak] labour market,” according to Jakub Zagora, an analyst at the Kosice IT Valley in eastern Slovakia. “At the same time, however, we see that the demand for workers still significantly exceeds the supply.” Obstacles to hiring foreign workers are many, ranging from uncertainty and bureaucratic hurdles to integrating them over the long term, to laborious permits procedures and enduring anti-foreigner sentiment among the population. About two-thirds of Slovak employees see foreigners as a potential threat to their own jobs, and three-quarters worry their employment hinders overall wage growth, according to a JobsIndex survey. “Employers still see more problems and obstacles than benefits in importing workers from abroad,” assessed Martin Szabo, a labour market expert at Alma Career Slovakia. Hungary’s restrictions have brought the tension between politics and economic needs sharply into focus. Since the government stopped issuing residence permits to people arriving under guest-worker contracts, employers have warned of difficulties filling vacancies and delays to investment. The door remains open to those applying for a so-called “residence permit for the purpose of employment”, but this is a more complicated and lengthy process, often taking nine to 12 months. “Companies are already feeling the consequences and complaining about the lack of workers from third countries,” says Kalmar of BusinessHungary. The organisation has been negotiating with the government to find a solution. Some urgently needed investments are already being delayed as companies are unsure whether they will be able to find enough suitably qualified workers. The debate intensified during the summer when the owner of Master Good, one of Hungary’s largest agrifood companies, threatened not to proceed with a 120-billion-forint investment, worth about 330 million euros, in a new meat-processing plant if guest workers were not allowed into the country. Critics accused the company of seeking to keep wages down, arguing that foreign workers, who are often willing to work longer hours than Hungarians, drive down pay. Yet Master Good’s owner, Laszlo Barany, countered that there were jobs for which the company simply could not find Hungarian workers. “There are shifts starting at 02:00 in the night, and the temperature in the processing plant is under 10 degrees Celsius all day,” he told Telex.hu. The company has employed guest workers from the Philippines for years to fill those positions. Kalmar argues that Hungarian and guest workers are often not alternatives to one another. “In many cases, employing guest workers for certain jobs serves the interests of Hungarian workers,” he says. If there are no food couriers, he explains, a cook’s job could be at risk; if there are no workers at the end of an assembly line, an engineer might also lose their job. The claims that foreign workers earn more than Hungarians are dismissed by Kalmar and, he says, is legally impossible. He acknowledges, however, that in some cases where a company has had to lay off workers, those dismissed were mostly Hungarian, while workers from third countries were retained. “They simply performed better,” he says. A survey conducted by HR company WHC found that 70 per cent of medium-sized and large Hungarian companies could not imagine operating without foreign workers. The same survey found scepticism about the government’s plans to bring 300,000-400,000 so-called inactive Hungarians back into the labour market. The problem with this proposed reserve is that people who are unemployed or economically inactive do not necessarily have the right skills, live in the right places or want the jobs on offer. “The problem is that this reserve usually does not match companies’ needs, either geographically or in terms of skills or motivation,” Kalmar explains. Poland’s experience illustrates a related difficulty: even when migrants are available, employers cannot assume they will remain in the jobs that are hardest to fill. In research involving employers in agriculture and hospitality, Kaczmarczyk’s team found that businesses had stopped advertising some jobs in Polish altogether because nobody responded. In agriculture, peak season can mean six or seven days a week and 10- or 12-hour shifts – conditions few Polish workers are willing to accept. Foreign labour has filled much of that gap, but workers who settle and integrate may eventually move into more attractive employment. Employees assemble a Volkswagen Crafter van at the Volkswagen Nutzfahrzeuge (Commercial Vehicles, VWN) factory in Wrzesnia, Poland, 24 October 2016. EPA/RAINER JENSEN Recruitment is only half the job Even governments that recognise the need for foreign workers face another obstacle: getting them into the country quickly, legally and on terms that allow them to remain. Czech employers have long complained about lengthy and frustrating bureaucracy that prevents them from hiring foreign workers quickly enough to meet short- and medium-term needs, including Ukrainians already in the country. “Labour migration solves the acute problem of labour shortages, but it cannot compensate for demographic developments,” warns Radovan Hauk of Moore CR consultancy. “Workers today almost always come to us for only two years, and only a tiny fraction of them stay with us or start a family here.” For Czech employers, the challenge is therefore not simply to recruit more people, but to make the process more predictable and encourage workers to stay. Sotona says a workable system needs largely digitalised procedures, clear deadlines, sufficient capacity at Czech embassies and consulates abroad, and more flexible programs and quotas that reflect the economy’s actual needs. Poland faces a different problem. Having built a large foreign workforce, it must contend with a recruitment system that has become increasingly difficult to oversee. Employment agencies have helped businesses recruit abroad, screen candidates, and navigate visa and legalisation procedures that many companies would struggle to manage themselves. But the resulting network of intermediaries has also created opportunities for abuse. Poland’s official register currently lists more than 7,300 employment agencies. The Labour Ministry counted 8,550 at the end of 2024, although not all recruit foreign workers. Beyond the formal market sits a harder-to-measure network of transnational recruiters and subcontractors operating across several jurisdictions. A worker recruited in Nepal or India might pass through several intermediaries before reaching a Polish employer. Some arrive heavily indebted after paying thousands of dollars in recruitment and travel costs, while the Polish state may know who the worker is but far less about the chain of actors behind their arrival. “Employers helped create a system that eventually slipped out of their control,” says Kamil Matuszczyk, a researcher at the University of Warsaw’s Centre of Migration Research who studies labour-migration intermediaries. “Intermediaries began to dictate some of the conditions, because employers increasingly depended on them to deliver the workers they needed.” The state has tried to tighten the rules, but the market has proved quicker. One new requirement barred agencies from recruiting foreign workers unless they had been operating for at least two years. Soon afterwards, Matuszczyk found dozens of established agencies being advertised for sale, effectively allowing newcomers to buy their way around the restriction. “The system for controlling agencies, intermediaries and recruiters is still underdeveloped,” says Kaczmarczyk. One solution, he suggests, would be “white lists” of intermediaries and companies that can demonstrate they provide high-quality services. But for Kaczmarczyk, Europe’s migration policy has another fundamental flaw: it fails to make use of the skills migrants already bring. “We keep talking about the need to attract highly qualified workers, while failing to recognise the potential that is already here, within the European Union,” he says. Ukrainians, many of whom have university degrees but work below their qualifications, are a particularly striking example. “We need to identify their skills, help them develop and adapt them to the needs of the labour market,” Kaczmarczyk says. “That seems far more sensible than looking for new workers when so many of them are already here.”