As Radio Prague notes, in the "upper" segment of the labor market, i.e., where highly qualified professionals work, Slovaks are mainly employed. They hold the lead among foreign doctors and, along with Romanians, also in IT.
"In the eyes of the public, labor migrants are a homogeneous mass. In reality, they are all very different. For example, guest workers from Slovakia and Romania are young. Each nationality prefers different professions. Most foreigners are employed in Prague, where salaries are higher than the national average, which is quite logical," says Dalibor Holý from the Czech Statistical Office.
Ukrainians are most often recruited for work in retail and agriculture. Poles work in mining enterprises, and a typical guest worker from Bulgaria is a man around 45 years old, engaged in maintenance of equipment at an industrial plant, notes Dalibor Holý.
A certain paradox is that the number of foreigners employed in Czechia exceeds the number of foreign citizens living in the country by more than twice. "The share of foreigners in the total workforce reaches 10.7 percent. On a permanent basis, 5 percent of foreign citizens live in the country, so there is a huge imbalance. They are all mostly of working age. We have practically no foreign pensioners, and few children," concludes the representative of the Czech Statistical Office.
Ukrainians are in the greatest demand among Czech employers. Thanks to the state program "Regime Ukraine," more than 20,000 of them have already been employed in Czechia. This figure will grow this year as well, says Eva Veličková, press secretary of the Union of Industry and Transport.
The government also intends to simplify the employment procedure for people from Moldova, Belarus, and Montenegro. After all, Czech firms consistently need an influx of foreign labor. According to the Employment Service data for 2018, the total number of vacancies across the country was 320,000. For comparison, the number of unemployed during that period did not exceed 230,000 people.