‘They will leave as well’: the downsides of the EU’s free movement policy
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The Telegraph reports that a Hungarian businessman, Péter Róna, took up a fight against the EU’s free movement policy which is slowly destroying his cheese factory, as his employees keep leaving Hungary.
Having studied economics at the University of Pennsylvania and law at the Oxford University, Péter Róna returned to Hungary to set up his own cheese business at Kisasszond. Today, his cheeserie employs 12 families, and it’s internationally successful, producing award-winning soft and smoked cheeses. He said that he set up this factory for one major reason: he was curious how much would it take to set up such a business in an ‘underdeveloped, disadvantaged, backwater part of the country from scratch’.
However, Róna’s business is slowly getting ruined, as his cheese-makers keep leaving for other countries. Róna says that he’s trained several cheese-makers, but they eventually end up leaving, for example to Switzerland. He told the Telegraph:
‘I don’t mind, I can find somebody else. I can train them – but I know they will leave as well. That’s just how it is.’
It is not only Róna who is unhappy with the EU’s free movement policy, but more and more Hungarian employers. Thanks to this policy, eastern European workers leave their home countries in hopes of making more money in western countries. However, in the case of Hungary, employees cannot be blamed, as the Hungarian minimum wage is EUR 400 a month, in contrast with the UK or Germany, where this sum is around EUR 1,400.
Even though emigrated workers live off better now, the home situation has become grave. Some Hungarian politicians argue that Hungary will face an economic collapse sometime in the next ten years.
Róna argues that there will be no strong sense of solidarity or cohesion within the EU, leading to disintegration, as there is too wide a gap between the wages gained in different nations. He even gives numbers and a concrete example:
“The average real wage of a Bulgarian, for example, is 18 per cent of the EU average.
And the real income of the richest district in the European Union, inner west London, is 600 times the income of the two poorest ones, in Romania and Bulgaria. Those are shocking numbers.”
As it is in most cases when a group of people aren’t pleased with some features of a given system, an EU Wage Union was called into being. It is run by politicians and activists from both central and eastern European EU member states, such as Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia.