Magazine: Recruiting new workers takes hard work

Trade magazin and Chain Bridge Club invited four prestigious speakers to their Business Dinner event, where decision-makers from the FMCG sector and economic experts met to discuss topical issues of the labour market. In certain regions of Hungary economic development is hindered by the lack of labour force. The good news is that the roundtable discussion at the Business Dinner revealed that all four speakers see a viable solution to this problem.

Ferenc Rolek, vice president of the Hungarian Confederation of Hungarian Employers and Industrialists (MGYOSZ) is of the opinion that painful changes have to be made if we want to solve the problem of labour force shortage. He told that the problem is rooted in demographic reasons and it didn’t come as a surprise either that many Hungarian workers had decided to go and find work abroad in the last few years. In addition to this, in the last 10 years Hungarian firms got a bit too comfortable and forgot to make the necessary investments. They also failed to make workers’ salaries more competitive. Now the time has come to make up for these missed steps – and from a worker’s perspective this is really good news as salaries will grow.

Barnabás Virág, managing director of the Central Bank of Hungary (MNB) sees a certain duality in the Hungarian labour market: the debt-based crisis that shaped the development of the world’s economy in the last few years created a situation where the economic development of certain regions and countries became vulnerable. After crises like these the labour market comes to life very slowly because the banking system is damaged. Hungary’s specific problem is that after 1990 more than 1 million jobs ceased to exist and the country has been suffering from this ever since. The managing director reckons that the financing environment for SMEs is much better now than it has been in recent years, as grants and loans are available for development.

Sándor Baja, the managing director of Randstad hopes that companies will change their attitude. He spoke about one of their surveys, according to which only one third of Hungarian workers would like to work in the FMCG sector and 20 percent want a job in retail – because the pay they would get didn’t increase in the last few years. He believes the solution to the problem of labour force shortage isn’t simply increasing wages: competitive salaries are important but workers also care about how the management of a company treats them and what the working conditions are like. It is now companies that need to ‘sell’ themselves to workers.

Tamás Éder, president of the Federation of Hungarian Food Industries (ÉFOSZ) believes that only rapid and efficient development can close the labour force gap. The big question is: Where will the money for this come from? What makes the situation of the food industry even worse is that the level of technological development is much lower than at our competitors. Lots of human labour is used in this sector and this makes it more exposed to a lack of workforce. To make things worse, the food industry was one of those sectors that received no adequate funding from national and EU-level programmes. Since food companies aren’t profitable, they don’t have the chance to get bank loans either. The president thinks that public workers should be integrated into the agri-food industry to solve the labour force problem. Another way to go could be adult education programmes, to train those people who were made redundant in other sectors. /