Even though the number of foreigners with jobs in Slovakia has almost doubled in the past two years, Slovakia remains a net exporter of labour, concluded an analysis done by UniCredit Bank Czech Republic and Slovakia released on Monday. According to the Statistics Office, around 150,000 Slovaks work abroad holding short-term jobs lasting less than one year in duration, with most of them being in Austria and the Czech Republic. "The real number of Slovaks working abroad is far higher, however," stated the bank's analysts. Meanwhile, the Finance Ministry used health insurance registries to estimate the number of Slovaks working abroad, discovering that as many as 300,000 people have left Slovakia in the past 15 years. The highest emigration rate concerned eastern Slovakia, with as many as 6 percent of the local population going abroad. While the biggest wave of emigration was observed shortly after the country joined the EU in 2004, most of these people returned within two years, and the labour drain currently concerns some 15,000 Slovaks annually.
Although Romania has been the richest source of foreign labour for Slovakia for a long time, Serbs have posted a massive increase as of late. Other nationals most frequently working in Slovakia include Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Ukrainians, Bulgarians, Croats, Italians and Koreans, with the latter two nationalities often holding managerial posts in companies originating from their own countries. "While Bratislava-based shared service centres have many foreign staff, many foreigners in Slovakia still predominantly work in jobs that don't require higher education and provide lower salaries, which are thereby less attractive for local people," said the analysts. The distribution of foreign staff is quite uneven, with the highest share in Trnava district, which has an urgent lack of labour, but surprisingly high numbers of foreign workers can also be found in some areas with high unemployment, including the districts of Revúca (Banská Bystrica region) and Svidník (Prešov region).
