Employment of 1,000 workers from Serbia in the Czech Republic to be facilitated from September

The Czech Republic is preparing to expand its program of facilitated employment of foreign workers to include Serbia, in addition to Ukraine, so that Czech companies could seek 1,000 workers a year more easily and quickly.

Due to increasing difficulties in finding qualified workers, the Czech Chamber of Commerce asked back in 2017 for the said program to expand to Serbia. The program allows 19,600 Ukrainians and 1,000 citizens of the Philippines and Mongolia each to come to work to the Czech Republic for longer than three months each year.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs therefore proposes for the government to soon adopt the Regime Serbia program, with 1,000 employees a year, which companies can't find in the Czech Republic.

In the past months, there has been an increased interest of Czech companies in workers from Serbia, and the embassy of the Czech Republic in Belgrade is not capable of handling the rising demand for visas (100%), so the waiting for filing a request may take up to three months, yesterday's issue of Pravo cites from the explanation by the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Through the regime of facilitation for Serbia, which should be implemented in September, Czech companies with over 10 employees, which have been operating for at least two years in the fields of production, services and the public sector, with a recommendation by Czechinvest or businessmen associations, may seek qualified workforce in Serbia as well and request an employee card and the work permit for workers they find through the accelerated and simplified regime.

The companies oblige to employ a worker from Serbia for at least a year and under the same terms and with the same salary as for Czech employees, and if the company seeks more than 30 workers, it needs to reach an agreement with representatives of local authorities in the places where Serbian workers will stay.

– Controlled arrival of workers who really want to work here and earn salaries is useful to our economy. It is also important to do a background check of the people who want to work in the Czech Republic in order to determine whether they have a criminal record – said Vit Rakusan, the chairman of the Foreign Policy Board at the Czech parliament.

The problem of the lack of workforce in Central Europe has been dramatically increasing in the past two years, and employers in the Czech Republic were offering 283,243 vacancies in late May, whereby it is estimated that foreign workers might fill as many as 194,049 vacancies.

Whereas as many as 73% Czech citizens believed that they couldn't find a job because of foreigners in the spring of 2014, when the unemployment reached 8.3%, according to the regular survey by STEM, this April, when the unemployment rate dropped to 3.2%, only 49% had a negative view of foreign workers.

The percentage of Czech citizens convinced that the arrival of foreign workers is the only solution for the problems of the economy also increased from 41% in March 2014 to 55% this April.

Czech Chamber of Commerce

Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Czechinvest

regime of facilitated employment of foreign workers in the Czech Republic

employee card Czech Republic

Regime Serbia

Vit Rakusan

interest of Czech companies in workers from Serbia

STEM

facilitated employment regime