In the past, workers in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) were unsuccessfully looking for work, and now many employers are unsuccessfully looking for workers.
Hundreds of thousands of them left the country. While employers are looking for liberalization of the import of foreign labor, all this is not the focus of the political elites. At the same time, domestic qualified labor is leaving across the border.
Inflation, which in BiH is the highest in Europe, and salaries that do not keep up with it are forcing even those who were the biggest opponents of emigration to think more and more about leaving. In BiH, families need three average salaries to survive a month. So, most citizens do not have money. Therefore, more and more of them go to work abroad.
When you look at the offers of companies abroad, it is not difficult to understand why this is so. The minimum wage in the Federation of BiH (FBiH) was increased by 53 BAM. It is not a problem to conclude that such an increase will not help families survive the month. In the West, they are offered many times higher salaries. A huge number of young people in BiH see this as an opportunity to escape from uncertainty and poverty. More than 50 percent of them want to leave BiH.
The data show that in the last ten years, the average net salary in BiH has increased by about 300 BAM, which, according to current statistics, is not enough to stop the outflow of labor. Employers, if they don’t want to put the key in the lock, will have to significantly increase wages. Otherwise, they will have no one to work for them.
Portal Buka conducted a survey among readers about what the salary workers would be satisfied with. The majority of readers, 42 percent, stated that they would be satisfied with a net salary of 2.000 BAM. 24 percent of readers would be satisfied with a lower salary in the range of 1.500 to 2.000 BAM, and only 3 percent with a salary of 1.200 to 1.500 BAM.
26 percent of those surveyed want a higher salary, in the range of 2.000 to 2.500 BAM, and 5 percent want a salary above this amount. The highest salary that is stated is 3.500 BAM.
In December, according to the data of the Confederation of Independent Trade Unions of BiH, the consumer basket amounted to 2.991 BAM and since the beginning of last year, it has increased by as much as 634 BAM. Namely, in January 2022, the consumer basket amounted to 2.357 BAM.
At the same time, the average net salary, which in January 2022 was 1.043 BAM, and in October, the last month for which the BiH Statistics Agency has data, 1.156 BAM, increased by only 113 BAM.
Economists have been warning for a long time that if both the government and employers do not change the status of workers for the better, people will leave and there will definitely be no one to work here. According to data from the Agency for Labor and Employment of BiH, 17.000 citizens of BiH last year found work in Slovenia alone. It is assumed that, including other European countries, the figures are significantly higher.
Employers have announced the import of labor from Bangladesh, Turkey, and India, Klix.ba reports.
E.Dz.
