A year and a half ago, Ashok Tamang said goodbye to his wife, 14-year-old daughter and newborn son, in order to come to work as a construction worker in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH).
He arrived in Sarajevo from Nepal, a country at the foot of the world’s highest mountain massif, the Himalayas.
Tamag is one of about 5,000 foreign workers in BiH, whose number has almost doubled since 2020, according to data from entity employment offices.
Most of them came this year from Turkey, Serbia, Bangladesh, Kuwait, and Croatia, the same data show.
Domestic employers could hire tens of thousands of foreign workers because there has been a shortage of labor in many industrial branches for years.
The Council of Ministers of BiH determines the quota for the import of foreign workers every year, based on information from the entity’s employment offices. This year, employers received permission to employ almost 4,000 workers.
Liberalization of labor imports and the domestic labor market
Employers propose that the state liberalize the import of labor.President of the Union of Employers of the Federation of BiH (FBiH), Adnan Smailbegovic say that it is in the interest of employers to find workers who want to work, so, they say, the state should speed up and simplify the procedures.
He adds that the estimate of the Association of Employers is that the labor market in BiH currently lacks about 30,000 workers, but that these needs would increase if it were to be liberalized. He explains that currently, employers who have the opportunity to expand their business do not do so.
In the Republika Srpska (RS), they are speeding up the issuance of permits
Sasa Acic, director of the Union of Employers’ Associations in the RS entity, says that he estimates that in the next five years employers from this entity alone will need between 20,000 and 30,000 foreign workers.
In this entity, according to him, the procedure for issuing work permits to foreign workers has been shortened to about two months, but that “it will have to be done faster”, Slobodna Evropa reports.
photo: Crna Hronika
E.Dz.
