If the wages don’t get raised, it will get worse and worse for everyone

Fearsome data has been published in the last few days. Firstly, the Economist published a diagram which shows that Hungary is in the first place on the list of unfilled jobs in Europe. Then, VS.hu pointed out that companies don’t even bother to advertise empty stands, they have stopped labour recruitment because they don’t find suitable employees. Kettosmerce.blog.hu looked into the matter thoroughly.

They write that the leader of a company in the refrigeration industry complained that there aren’t enough engineers who they could employ. At this point we should recap the news from the summer which informed us that there was a shortage in seasonal workers so the jobs were filled with students. In one case, the whole staff of a restaurant quit and went to work in Austria. The government responded with the change of a law which now enables obligatory labour service for seasonal workers.

And this doesn’t only affect the private sector. Most places for family doctors have been unfilled for years, underpaid public service employees are constantly leaving their jobs and emigrating. Just think about nurses, social workers or public cultural employees whose net average income doesn’t reach 100 thousand forints.

We are slowly getting to a phase where in certain fields the shortage of labour endangers the safety of sustenance, whereas in other fields the emigration of qualified labour force limits economic growth. Many multinational firms have chosen neighbouring countries instead of Hungary due to the shortage of qualified labour force.

What causes this situation?

The emigration of qualified labour force is the biggest reason of the difference in income between Hungary and other West-European countries. This difference seems to be turning into a cleft. Low wages paired with bad labour conditions and weak rights for employees would be enough motives in themselves. If someone can earn much more abroad and speaks the language even just a little bit, why stay in Hungary? For a long time, the powerful upper-class didn’t believe that this could happen because data showed that the Hungarian labour force isn’t that mobile (they don’t speak foreign languages). But economics and social sciences have always been tricky. Nothing is visible in the beginning but when the absolute level of difference in income reaches a critical point, things start up. If the stake is big enough, one would learn Chinese in three days, right?

The process of emigration accelerated when Germany’s and Austria’s moratorium ended in 2011. People chose these new gates with hopes for a better life.

What didn’t help either is that the reigning government from 2010 shapes/shaped the national economy into works of low qualified workers. The high level of corruption, the shortage of efficiency in the polity, the unpredictability, the separate taxes and other bad elements of political economy lead to the decay of the competitiveness of the Hungarian economy. This decay came with the sticking of productivity. Low productivity limits the maximum of income. Compared to other states of the region, the Hungarian net average income has been dropping in the last 5 years. For instance, Slovakia passed us in the beginning of the year.