ČR faces problem of redundant foreign workforce

Prague, Nov 20 (CTK) - The number of job vacancies is sharply falling in the Czech Republic as a result of the world financial crisis, but unskilled foreign labourers continue flowing into the country en masse, attracted by the Czech demand of cheap workforce, the daily Lidove noviny wrote Thursday.

However, no jobs are waiting for the foreigners in the Czech Republic any more, commentator Lubos Palata writes.

The first big companies in the country, including VW Skoda car maker, have already launched uncompromising lay offs of foreign employees, Palata says.

The companies make foreigners redundant not because the company managers are racists, though, true, most Czechs prefer the newspaper headline "Skoda car maker to lay off Slovaks and Poles" rather than "Skoda has thrown out hundreds of Czechs," Palata says.

The reason rests elsewhere. Big companies hire foreign workforce via agencies, thus circumventing the law on employment and other binding directives in this respect, he continues.

With a tacit approval from official places, a new category of people has emerged on the Czech labour market, whose rights are not equal to standard employees'. At the moment, this situation convenes to all, but it poses a very dangerous precedent for the future, Palata writes.

Who will guarantee to the Czechs that, if the national economy continued slowing down or were hit by a crisis, they will not be told to choose from among a job mediated by an agency or no job at all, Palata says.

Perhaps the end of the economic boom has fortunately come in time so it might stop the Czech government's nonsensical project of attracting unskilled and cheap workforce to local assembling plants, he writes.

If the years of the economic prosperity end now, the Czech government will be faced with the problem of "only" several hundreds of thousands of foreigners who will become redundant on the labour market. However, it could have been as many of them as million or more [if the economy had slowed down later], Palata writes.

Even in the current situation, the unskilled foreign workforce, whom the current government has not only opened the Czech Republic to but whom it even invited to settle down in the country, will pose a huge problem in the period of a crisis or a lower economic prosperity, Palata says.

Only a small fraction of the foreigners who will lose their jobs in the Czech Republic in the months to come will be willing and able to return to their homelands, mainly now that the crisis has already severely hit Ukraine, Moldova, Russia and other states in the region from which the import of workforce to the Czech Republic has been the most massive, Palata writes.

If the Czech "inventors of the import of unskilled gastarbeiters" want to know how such situations usually develop, let them look at the Paris suburbs, at the south of Italy etc.

The situation in the Czech Republic might further develop even more dramatically, Palata says.

After all, the present Czech state is incapable of solving the social situation of its own 200,000 Romanies, who are also mostly unskilled labourers, but the government prefers importing other unskilled labourers from abroad, Palata adds.

"Let's hope that the economic slow down will force the government to definitively scrap its plans for massive import of unskilled workforce. Let's pray for the state to manage dignifiedly cope with the situation of the foreigners who will be left jobless in the Czech Republic in the near future," Palata says.