New data reveals which industries in the Czech Republic employ the most foreigners

About 15 percent of employees in the Czech Republic are foreigners and their percentage in the workforce nearly tripled between 2010 and 2019, according to the data that the Czech Statistical Office (CSU) released on Monday.

The percentage of foreign workers increased in all fields with that rise in their numbers stopping during the coronavirus crisis last year, but only temporarily.

He said this is because Czech society is ageing and the number of senior citizens is increasing, while those in the economically active age group is decreasing.

In 2010, there were about 215,400 foreign employees in the Czech Republic, and they made up 5.5 percent of all the employees. At the end of 2019, about 621,900 foreigners were employed in the country and they formed 14.7 percent of all the 4.23 million employees.

In the agriculture and forest industry, 17 percent of the employees were foreigners before the coronavirus epidemic, while in 2010 they represented four percent of the employees.

One-quarter of the employees in accommodation, catering and restaurant services were foreigners one year ago, while ten years ago they made up only six percent. In the building industry, the share of foreign employees doubled over the last decade from 14 to 28 percent.

In the field of administrative and assistant activities, a majority of the employees, 54 percent, were foreigners in 2019, while one in ten of these employees was a foreigner in 2010.

In the manufacturing industry, the share of foreign workers rose from six to nearly 16 percent over the given period of time. Industrial plants employed 66,000 foreigners in 2010 and 178,700 in 2019.

Holy said Czechs were primarily employed in education, health, and social care, science, and IT in the past decade. Holy noted that foreign workers tend to do work in the fields in which the language barrier is not important, or do manual labor. But he said there is also a group of highly qualified experts from abroad in the country, for example, in information technologies.