ZAGREB, June 17, 2018 - Croatia's tourism and all other industries increasingly depend on foreign labour, which is why the government last week doubled the quota of 4,660 foreign workers, but the problem cannot be resolved without complex measures regulating the long term immigration policy, experts believe.
The Croatian Chamber of Commerce (HGK) estimates that between 15,000 and 20,000 workers will be needed in tourism this summer. According to the Croatian Employment Service, the most sought-after workers in the first four months of the year were in accommodation, food preparation and serving, retail and wholesale.
The HGK says 16,373 workers were needed, mainly waiters, salespersons, maids, cleaning staff, cooks, kitchen and reception desk staff. Over the first four months of 2018, 11,055 registered jobless were employed, mainly in those professions.
Saša Poljanec Borić, a tourism sociologist at Zagreb's Ivo Pilar Institute, says the workforce shortage in Croatian tourism is due to the fact that it is a labour intensive industry, so any rise in quality increases the workforce demand.
Danijel Nestić of Zagreb's Institute of Economics says the problem is not specific to Croatia, as all of Europe is increasingly facing an imbalance between workforce supply and demand. The strengthening of the economy has resulted in a workforce shortage in services. More and more people have university degrees and the pool of those willing to work in services, even for a somewhat higher salary, is shrinking, he says.
In tourism, it is more difficult to make up for that shortage through better work organisation, salaries are relatively low and their increase can solve the problem only in part, he adds.
This year's quotas for foreign workers total 35,500 but this is not a long term solution, says Snježana Gregurović, a sociologist at the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies, adding that Croatia should urgently draw up an immigration policy given its population and economic trends.
Nestić says Croatia has long relied on the Bosnian workforce but that pool, and perhaps the one in Serbia too, has dried up as the workforce demand in Europe is big and workers from former Yugoslav countries look to the European market.
Explaining why Croatia has a high jobless rate and a big demand for jobs at the same time, Poljanec Borić says Croatia has a certain number of structurally unemployable people.
Croatia has overcome the big problem of transition unemployment, which was up to 22% in certain periods of time, and unemployment is now about 10%.
Since successful economies operate with about 4% unemployment as a normal state of affairs, one can conclude that those are structurally unemployable people, a societal problem which must be resolved by political means, she says.
Nestić reiterates that higher salaries are a short term solution and that, in the long term, Croatia should define its immigration policy which will turn to third countries, including those which are not EU accession candidates.
