30,000 people are missing from the Hungarian construction industry – can workers from Asia be employed?

Both vg.hu and index.hu report that around 20,000-30,000 people are missing from the Hungarian construction industry mostly because, although the price of workmanship has increased, the structure of the collectively agreed wages is still improper and the increased wages still do not reach  people at the lower stages.

The shortage of the approximately 20,000-30,000 people’s work in the Hungarian construction industry is due to the fact that, although the price of workmanship has increased, the structure of the collectively agreed wages is still unacceptable. Furthermore, most of the perks do not reach people at the lower stages as they get lost in the small and medium-sized enterprises (KKV sector in Hungary). It is there that 90% of the employees still live from minimal wages and the enterprises are  unwilling to spend on development. As an inevitable consequence, many workers try their luck abroad.

Sándor Scheer, the president and the Chief Executive Officer of the Market Zrt. remarked that

from all this, it is fairly obvious that the emigration of the skillful workers from the country did not come to a halt, even though the money from which the wages could be raised is already in the sector.

According to the president, who through his subsidiary companies employs 827 employees, among whom 237 are engineers, and who works on 42 major projects that foreseeingly earns him approximately 344 million euros (106 billion forint) this year, is convinced that it is the lust of the middle-sized businesses that causes severe problems.

While the problem of debt queues have been successfully solved, a new complication has arisen: it does not have any affect that the general contractors pay the demanded 9.70 € (3,000 Ft) hourly wage, because it is still very common that the skillful workers in most enterprises are underpaid. This is what explains their emigration. In the absence of a better solution, the Market builds up a new team and makes the execution of the constructions more complex.

The answer to the problem of labour shortage which Western Europe faced was initially Eastern Europe, but provided that the Ukrainian workers have already been employed in the West, the Hungarian shortage of workforce cannot be solved from that area. As Sándor Scheer points out

within 3-5 years, a possible solution might be to enter into contract with Chinese, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Pakistani workers.

He further commented on the problem of the lack of regular controls and also on another bitter issue which is present in the immensely long and morselized domain of sub-contractors where 90% of the businesses employ 4-5 people. He proposes the consideration of creating business clusters to reduce the amount of time needed for each processes.

Finally, as noted by Sándor Scheer, the government still stays silent about the discounted taxes in the future that aggravates the situation by further bringing about accumulated purchase orders.

Source: index.hu ; vg.hu