Romania increasingly relies on foreign workers, who earn at least as much here in a month as they earn in a year in their home countries.
If you ask him, however, he says, awkwardly, in heavily accented English, that he came here a few years ago to earn a better living than at home. Originally from Punjab, a province divided between India and Pakistan, his family remained on the Pakistani side of the border after the partition in 1947. The average net income there is about 500 US dollars a year. In Romania, Singh earns the same amount in a single month, from what his employer gives him and what customers leave him. Initially, he wanted to go to western Europe, to Germany or the UK, where people would perhaps look at him less in wonder. He stopped in Romania in 2017, for just a few months, he thought. And in the end he stayed here, he got used to it.
The 42-year-old Indian is just one of thousands of Asian workers who have built a new life in Romania. These days we see them everywhere: Vietnamese working on insulating blocks of flats, Sri Lankans in bakeries, Nepalese in agriculture or restaurants, Thais in the reception desks of seaside hotels. And, of course, the famous Filipino domestic nannies.
Attractive salaries
An unskilled Asian worker earns at least $450 a month, regardless of the field, says Romulus Badea, a tax partner at Soter & Partners, a consultancy firm and vice-president of the Employers' Association of Labor Importers. In construction, the gains are even better. In the absence of Romanian workers, who have also left for better wages in the West, their Asian replacements earn at least 3,000 lei/month, or around 700 dollars. Depending on the country they come from, that's how much they would make back home in about two years.
But such salaries mean working eight hours a day, six days a week, says Yosef Gavriel Peisakh, general manager of Work From Asia. He also says that on top of these salaries come the cost of accommodation and meals, which are paid exclusively by the employers of foreign staff. "The most common package includes net salary, accommodation, daily meals and health insurance," says Romulus Badea, who was on a recruitment trip to Sri Lanka when he spoke to NewMoney.
On the basis of compulsory health insurance, many foreign workers living in Romania have benefited from the anti-COVID-19 vaccination since last summer, when Romanians were bypassing immunization centers. In addition to the costs borne by Romanian employers, Romanian workers coming from the Far East have to pay airfare. Or bus fares for workers coming from closer geographical areas, such as Turkey. The initial cost of importing labor ranges from several hundred to €1,000 per worker.
According to Bogdan Badea, chief executive officer (CEO) of the eJobs platform, a new trend is that many Asian workers have started looking for work in Ro Roanger on your own. "They profile themselves on the website and apply for jobs. They are mostly nationals from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Vietnam. Some of them are even specialists in certain fields, and I'm talking about tradesmen," says Bogdan Badea. He explains his situation by "the publicity that recruitment agencies have unwittingly given to jobs and salaries in Romania". Bogdan Badea adds that the specialists of the platform he runs have checked the IPs of the accounts in question and they are indeed created in Asian countries from where many workers have come in recent years. "These people are applying, they are looking at certain positions for which they are otherwise well suited, and their search is pretty accurate from that point of view," says the eJobs CEO.
A farmer's costs
Constantin Șandru (42) owns an integrated farm in Mănărade, near Blaj (Alba). Last year he brought the first five Nepalese to work. He has 600 hectares of land, a farm with 450 cows and a dairy. And too little labor. "If I could find Romanians willing to work, I would never hire from abroad. They have another culture, another way of thinking, they are different. They don't know the language, if you want to move them from one job to another, it's a problem," says Șandru. The farmer complains that "there are no Romanians who want to work at the bottom" and pessimistically predicts that "in 10 years, livestock farming will disappear not just in Romania, but in the whole of Europe".
Șandru paid the Romanian state about 2,700 lei per worker for the paperwork. And for the first five Nepalese workers he hired, the costs paid to the recruitment firm "were around 10,000 lei, or €2,000, including the brokerage commission", he recalls.
Now, 8 Nepalese laborers are working on the farm of Constantin Șandru. There were 11 at one time, but one left immediately, he didn't get used to it, another returned home after his first contract. Another is on vacation and the employer is not sure if he will return to the farm.
Temporary solution
For the farmers of the Transylvanian region, as for other employers, importing labor can only be a short-term solution.
The hotel industry also turned to Asian workers this summer due to an acute shortage of staff, says Cristian Bărhălescu, manager of Icar Tours Constanta and a member of the board of the National Association of Tourist Agencies (ANAT). They need, first of all, to speak the language. The language barrier is very important, especially since the vast majority of tourists on the Romanian coast are Romanians," explains Bărhălescu. For these employers, the government's intention to double the number of work permits for foreigners in 2022 to around 100,000 will not change the situation much. And even that number might not be enough.
Jobs many, employees few
According to the National Employment Agency, there were 160,405 job vacancies in August 2021, up nearly 3% from the same period a year earlier. And nearly 30,000 of those jobs were repeatedly declared vacant by employers.
Even if in the long term other solutions would be preferable, for 2022 employers cannot afford to be picky about the labor they are offered. "Once they see the example of others, Romanian firms become much more willing to use imported workers. They recruit less from the open market and more through specialized agencies. The reason is that the procedures to follow are quite complicated. It's not as easy as when you hire Romanian citizens: here's the job offer, tomorrow let's say a candidate accepts it, the day after tomorrow you send him to the occupational medicine, and the next week he's in the breadbasket," says Bogdan Badea, CEO of eJobs. He says that business people in the industries with the highest labor shortages, i.e. construction and HoReCa, are the most open to hiring workers from outside the European Union, "Otherwise it's very hard to find people," adds Bogdan Badea.
PNRR with foreign workers
In construction, at least, the presence of Asian workers is vital. For Romulus Badea, that was precisely the purpose of the trip to Sri Lanka: to recruit for future residential and infrastructure sites. "We expect that in 2022 there will be an explosion in the demand for labor in this sector, because the big projects foreseen in the PNRR (National Recovery and Resilience Plan, editor's note) will start, and Romania has nowhere near enough staff. There is also civil construction, which is precisely why this area remains at the top," says Romulus Badea.
It's not just construction that's short of cheap workers. "In factories there is a need for unskilled labor on the shop floor, for repetitive tasks, for packing and handling goods. Workers will be needed in logistics, all the big centers are in shortage of warehouse workers," adds the vice president of the Employers' Federation of Importers of Labor.
"There is demand for almost all fields of activity, mostly in construction, but also in HoReCa, especially for the summer season. We can easily respond to the requests, we have experience in bringing in foreign staff for almost all types of business. We deliver the manpower after video tests and online interviews with potential employees," explains Yosef Gavriel Peisakh from Work from Asia.
The firm he runs also receives many requests for car servicing, agricultural and domestic staff. "From babysitters and housekeepers to domestic assistants, who are in charge of providing transportation services, maintenance for the electrical and plumbing," the manager exemplifies.
"What is interesting is that in many cases, these foreign citizens are employed with higher salaries than Romanian citizens would have had in similar positions," says Bogdan Badea. The reason is that the countries where the workers come from often impose a minimum income threshold to allow them to work. Even if they increase their labor costs, Romanian employers are satisfied, says Bogdan Badea, because "workers from Asia are more stable and even more serious than Romanian employees in terms of their work".
Victims of red tape
Despite pandemic-dictated lockdowns in several Asian countries, such as India and Nepal, the import of labor from these areas is booming. Nearly 4,500 workers were brought in in 2021 from these countries alone. The surprise of the year, however, is Turkey, from where most foreigners came to work in Romania: 2,770. Turks have overtaken Vietnamese in the top employment preferences, after Vietnam was the country from which most foreign workers came in the last years before the pandemic, with a record of almost 6,300 in 2019.
"Now," says Romulus Badea, "Vietnam is closed, you can't enter there. And for India, Nepal and Bangladesh, visas are issued at the Romanian Consulate in New Delhi, where there are many applications and huge delays, months". The recruiter says a worker from these areas actually arrives in Romania almost ten months after being selected. "The problem is at the Romanian Consulate, whose staff is understaffed compared to the demand. But this is not just happening on the Indian subcontinent - it's happening everywhere," says Badea.
The CEO of Work from Asia has a similar experience. "We run into bureaucratic problems, which prevent us from optimizing our business strategy," says Yosef Gavriel Peisakh. "Ideally, the decision to increase the quota of foreign workers with the right to work in Romania should be matched by an increase in the number of staff working at the General Inspectorate for Immigration and Romanian embassies to issue work visas and entry visas. We hope that the authorities also understand the need for additional staff," Peisakh added.
A candidates' market
Even if the Romanian authorities double the number of work permits granted to foreigners to 100,000 next year, many jobs will remain vacant in 2022, believes Bogdan Badea, CEO of eJobs. Which will inevitably lead to an increase in the salaries offered by employers. "It's getting harder and harder to find qualified or talented people in certain industries. And the biggest danger is that as the Western European market recovers and starts to grow, more and more Romanians will leave for the better earnings in the West," Bogdan Badea points out. He estimates that tens of thousands of Romanians could leave the country in the next few years, and the sectors that will lose the most will be those already suffering from the shortage of workers: construction, transportation (where companies are looking for truck drivers) and healthcare. Bogdan Badea estimates that "this pressure will lead to an even sharper rise in wages in 2022", after the generalized increase in wages offered for hiring in 2021.
Migrating Romania
730,000 Romanians say they want to emigrate in 2022. It's the result of a survey by the think tank ReThink Romania. Over the past 30 years, millions of Romanians have left the country for the West.
- Italy. 1.3 million Romanians live legally on the peninsula, according to Romanian associations in Italy.
- Spania. More than 1.1 million Romanians are official residents in Spain, the largest number of foreigners with the right to stay in the country, according to the government in Madrid.
- United Kingdom. Almost one million Romanians were reported in the summer to have a residence permit in the UK, by far the largest minority in the country. The figure could be double that, taking into account Romanians with dual nationality and those who have not yet registered.
- Germania. Nearly 800,000 Romanians emigrated to Germany, mainly after 2010.
