Employing a foreigner will be easier

03.04.2024 08:48

Andrej Lasz, Secretary General of APZD, was a guest on the RTVS programme Ekonomika 24. The Ministry of the Interior is proposing to simplify the admission of foreigners for work, which employers welcome, but unions have concerns about a negative impact on social dialogue. Increasing the share of employees from third countries may affect the quality of collective bargaining. The new system is to simplify and speed up the process of admitting foreigners to work in Slovakia.

The admission of foreigners should be simplified, accelerated and increased; the tripartite body discussed the Interior Ministry's amendment today. Employers have long complained about the rigidity of the system. They therefore welcome the proposal, they would accept it if the share of foreigners in shortage occupations were even higher than the proposal. The Secretary General of APZD Andrej Lasz spoke about the situation on the labour market and in the area of admitting employees from third countries.

„The question we have to ask ourselves is why we cannot fill 86 thousand jobs with 139 thousand available workers, and somewhere there we have a systemic problem. These are often people who work abroad and at home are only registered at the labour office, these are people who unfortunately work in the black economy and naturally do not declare it, of course, and are registered as unemployed and so on, so it has to be said that employing foreigners is really so costly, expensive and time-consuming that any Slovak company, if it could find an employee among Slovaks, would do so four times over rather than employ a foreigner,“

says Andrej Lasz, Secretary General of APZD.

You can find more information in the RTVS programme Ekonomika 24 starting at 4:49.