Foreigners now make up 11% of the Czech workforce

Nearly 11% of employees in the Czech Republic are foreigners, according to data released yesterday by the Czech Statistical Office.

That contrasts with the total number of foreigners in the Czech Republic, around 5% of the country’s total population – – meaning a significantly higher percentage of them are in the workforce.

About 472,400 employees in the Czech Republic are foreigners, which represents an increase of nearly 200,000 people compared to a decade ago. An additional 87,200 foreigners operate on trade licenses.

After a small dip in the number of foreigners employed in the Czech Republic around the 2008 global financial crisis, there has been a huge increase over the past ten years.

Much of the increase has been due to citizens from EU countries, many of whom are under employment contracts. The number of entrepreneurs on trade licenses has grown at a slower rate.

“Foreigners account for 10.7 percent of the total number of employees,” Czech Statistical Office Director of Labor Market Statistics Dalibor Holý stated in a press release.

“Considering that they account for roughly five percent of the population, there is a huge disproportion. Foreigners are mostly of working age […] There are hardly any of retirement age, and there are few children.”

The majority of foreign employees in the Czech Republic come from Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria.

While the stereotype of Ukrainian workers in the Czech Republic in construction and industrial fields may hold true, the same isn’t necessarily true of other those from the other countries.

A large number of employees from Bulgaria and Romania are employed in programming and IT jobs in the Czech Republic, and Holý concludes that there is something of a brain drain of qualified workers from Eastern Europe into the Czech workforce.

Foreign employees in the Czech Republic also tend to earn more than their Czech counterparts.

While the average Czech employee made around 26,000 crowns per month in 2017, the average Slovak working in the Czech Republic made 31,000 crowns, and the average Romanian about 30,000 crowns.