A significant number of Hungarian workers do not return to their former workplace abroad. Over the past year, tens of thousands of commuters have been stuck in the country due to border closures, and more and more of them are trying to find a job at home.

Even before the epidemic, fewer and fewer people left Hungary to work abroad, while more and more people returned home. This process has been further strengthened in the past year, said Zoltán Török, Raiffeisen Bank's chief analyst, to Világgazdaság, after some reports suggest that the number of people who can permanently return home from their foreign locations may reach 15-20 thousand.

He added that the fact that the trend has reversed is also due to the fact that, taking into account the cost of living, in the case of certain jobs, there is no longer such a difference between Western European and domestic salaries as before.

According to him, even in the construction industry there may be income opportunities in Hungary that do not justify employment abroad.

The IT sector has also narrowed the gap, domestic wages are only 20-30 percent behind German wages, he pointed out.

According to the latest data from the Central Statistical Office, 35,000 fewer people worked outside our country's borders in the summer months than in the same period of 2019. After the border closures at the end of last year, tens of thousands of people were stuck at home, many of them settled in Hungary, albeit temporarily. It is probably thanks to them that several employment records have been broken in recent months. It is important to emphasize that here we are talking about those who have a household in Hungary, who have permanently moved out, they do not appear in the domestic statistics.

In Austria, workers are being recruited with full force, since the ski season is coming, the suction effect will definitely prevail - Zoltán Karácsony, HR Portal's labor market expert, highlighted the picture. The expert also admitted that the return of the labor force started as a result of the wage increase that started after 2015-2016, and because of this, competitive salaries are being met in more and more areas, at the same time he also pointed out that the salary is not the only deciding factor when it comes to employment abroad, at least as much as the social environment or ensuring the appropriate quality of life.

As he said, the main question when changing countries is whether there is a family. Those who already have it and have been living abroad for a long time find it difficult to come back, it is easier to lure employees back before the child is born, he added. In any case, according to him, anyone who hasn't gone abroad until now probably won't. According to Zoltán Karácsony, the fact that fewer and fewer people are leaving Hungary to work is also due to the fact that the employers' attitude has changed, they are trying to retain the workforce, read Világgazdaság.

Source: hirado.hu

Featured image: European Employment Service/illustration