7 ms·

Businesses are scrambling for workers in Hungary

brownbat 8y ago
In "The Next 100 Years," Friedman predicted that globally declining birth rates would lead states to start fighting to attract immigrants. That book is full of incorrect predictions that are nonetheless interesting. It's weird to see low unemployment correlated instead with nationalism.
- hayksaakian 8y ago
  >It's weird to see low unemployment correlated instead with nationalism. Why is it weird? Isn't it consistent with any historical period of mass migration?
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    It's not weird because I suggest there's no correlation. Hungary is losing a ton of workers because everywhere West of it pays a lot more. This is the first order issue, not local politics. Brexit would arguably be a rather nationalist form of action and the UK is a primary destination for Europeans, and others.
  - brownbat 8y ago
    Weird because immigration directly helps alleviate labor shortages, not weird because it's ahistorical. Like when some people are sickest they are most likely to turn to pseudoscience rather than the actual science they need.
javagram 8y ago
This is a very interesting article. It shows both the benefits and the downside of this type of policy. > He tried recruiting workers from small villages, with scant success. So last year, he began to recruit deaf employees. He refitted his machines with blinking lights and retrained managers to work with deaf people. Mr. Katona has streamlined operations to improve efficiency, including adding more robotic machines. In a counterfactual situation where immigration continued, it seems like these Deaf people wouldn’t have been able to get jobs. On the other hand, the immigrants who couldn’t come are just as human and now lose the opportunity for the jobs. It makes it feel like a zero-sum situation, although I know that according to economic theory freedom including the freedom to migrate would allow greater efficiency and wealth for all.
- benj111 8y ago
  "allow greater efficiency and wealth for all." As far as I'm aware, migration increases wealth, I don't think its necessarily distributed evenly. That's where govt policy's should be stepping in.
- dmortin 8y ago
  > the immigrants who couldn’t come are just as human and now lose the opportunity for the jobs. Actually, Hungarian companies do bring immigrant workers form Ukraine, etc. despite what Orban preaches, but apparently it's not enough.
  - Scoundreller 8y ago
    Cultural differences aside, neighbouring Ukraine has 4.5x the population with almost half the wages (adjusted for CoL/PPP). Hungary should be a slam dunk, no?
    - 29083011397778 8y ago
      The Ukrainian workers are more likely to go to Poland, due to better wages and friendlier immigration policies, according to the article
      - chewz 8y ago
        Also due to similarity of languages. After short time Ukrainians can speak Polish well enough to communicate with just a bit of Eastern accent.
    - dmortin 8y ago
      Maybe language is a problem, because Hungarian is pretty difficult to learn for foreigners, so I guess migrant workers can only be employed for simple jobs where language is not an issuse. I heard about foreign construction workers where the company added translators to the crew, so the construction manager can talk to the workers via the translator. I don't know how efficient this is in practice.
mnm1 8y ago
I bet there would be no shortages of workers if wages went up. But of course when the free market favors the workers, it must be regulated away. When the market favors employers, it's working as expected. The situation is the same here in the US. Idiot leader, massive corruption, economy growing, and labor "shortages." I wonder how long this condition will last before it collapses due to stupid, hateful policies. It won't be long now.
- IdiocyInAction 8y ago
  > I bet there would be no shortages of workers if wages went up. Indeed. The fact that there are so many high-wage countries around Hungary is one of the reasons why it has this problem anyway.
- dmortin 8y ago
  > I bet there would be no shortages of workers if wages went up. Multinational companies bring factories to Hungary, because labor is cheap. If wages go up then I guess many of those factories pack up and move east for other countries with lower wages. So wages should go up but then many jobs may disappear.
  - gdhbcc 8y ago
    Sounds like the ideal scenario, no?
  - Jorge1o1 8y ago
    And thus the labor shortage ends. Less jobs, higher wages. It’s just the markets at work mate.
- skybrian 8y ago
  Yes, people are attracted by higher wages, but if you put up barriers preventing them from taking the job, it prevents the market from working. The article is about a government putting up barriers preventing businesses from hiring workers. This is a regulatory barrier.
klenwell 8y ago
Those workers have yet to show up. And hundreds of thousands of young Hungarians who left in recent years for better-paying jobs in Europe’s big cities are not heeding Mr. Orban’s call to return and serve their homeland. The labor shortage has grown so acute that the government recently pushed through a contentious bill to address it. Widely referred to as the slave law, it allows employers to require up to 400 hours of overtime annually from its workers, while delaying compensation for up to three years. Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party promoted the measure as good for workers, saying it would let “those who want to work more earn more.” In America, we call these "right-to-work" laws. To my knowledge, none have gone this far yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
- votepaunchy 8y ago
  Unpaid or delayed pay for work has nothing to do with right-to-work and is illegal throughout America. The first paragraph from the cited link: “In the context of U.S. labor politics, "right-to-work laws" refers to state laws that prohibit union security agreements between companies and labor unions. Under these laws, employees in unionized workplaces are banned from negotiating contracts which require all members who benefit from the union contract to contribute to the costs of union representation.”
- throwaway2016a 8y ago
  This very much misrepresents Right to Work. I'm going to try to answer this without taking a side... The point of Right to Work is to prevent predatory unions from doing things like forcing people to pay dues to them or negotiating preferential treatment only to people who choose to pay dues. Or, say, go without pay during a strike when the worker may indeed rather be working. Of course, this can be a problem because it reduces the collective bargaining power of unions if an employee can simply refuse to strike. But at the same time, it also forces unions to be providing real material value in exchange for their dues since they now have to convince workers that it is worth paying dues instead of being able to extract dues in a mandatory way. You may be confusing what Right to Work is designed for with what opponents of it think will happen if union power is reduced.
rayiner 8y ago
This article wildly misrepresents Hungary’s new overtime law. The article makes it seem like employers can demand workers to work 400 hours of overtime and not pay them until 3 years later. The fact that it talks about the “perception” of the law rather than the actual legal provisions is telling. Here is what the law does: https://www.twobirds.com/en/news/articles/2019/hungary/new-controversial-rules-on-overtime-and-reference-period-in-hungary https://www.twobirds.com/en/news/articles/2019/hungary/new-c.... The law primarily regulates the terms of collective bargaining agreements. Most EU countries provide for such agreements to include a maximum amount of overtime for scheduled hourly workers. Some countries, like the US and Netherlands, don’t specify any maximum. The new Hungary law raises the overtime limit from 250 hours per year to 400. (France, for example, is 220. Norway is up to 400 by individual agreement. In California, there is no annual limit, but workers can’t be disciplined for not working more than 72 hours per week. The Netherlands has no annual limit, but a limit of 60 hours per week. In the new Hungary law, the maximum per week is 48.) The three years is not how long employers have to pay for the extra hours, but refers to the “reference period” in the collective bargaining agreement over which what counts as overtime is calculated. People must still be paid their hourly rate for those overtime hours. A reference period in excess of court months, moreover, can only be set forth in a collective bargaining agreement. Calling raising the limit on maximum overtime a “slave law” is propaganda, pure and simple. (Unless you subscribe to the notion that working for someone who privately owns the means of production is “wage slavery” but if that’s the case you should flag that premise to avoid misleading the reader.)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Luc 8y ago
  So an employer could make someone work 400 hours of overtime for a couple of years, yet never pay them the overtime rate. They could do this by reducing the employee's hours in the third year, so that averaged over 3 years no overtime was due. That sounds like a great deal... for the employer.
- metafex 8y ago
  Yes, the employers can and will try to pay out the overtime only after that time. And some are already trying to do just that. There have been large protests which the state media doesn't even cover at all and honestly, calling this propaganda is quite dishonest. Also workers are being "convinced" to sign agreements because otherwise they are out of a job. Source: Austrian with Hungarian partner, and with friends in Hungary.
jellicle 8y ago
> pays minimum wage: 5500 euros per year (USD $6100) > will not increase salaries > confused about why no workers > no one can figure it out > nobel prize if you can figure it out > let's write another story in the NYT about it > baffling
perfunctory 8y ago
"Labor Shortage" is just another example of framing. The word shortage suggests a problem. While there is no problem at all. "Labor Shortage" is actually very good for the majority of the population. I enjoy the shortage of software developers every day of my life. It's great.
- 4ntonius8lock 8y ago
  I'm surprised we don't hear about 'cheap iphone shortage'. Somehow the laws of supply and demand are well fitted to price products (produced by those holding capital) but not labor (produced by ordinary people)
  - damnyou 8y ago
    Yep, that's exactly right. Labor does not behave like ordinary goods.
- damnyou 8y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy It's ok to be mistaken about this, the way labor markets behave isn't very intuitive. The important thing to note is that the higher order effects of labor supply overwhelm the first order ones.
- badpun 8y ago
  > "Labor Shortage" is actually very good for the majority of the population. It sort of depends. You could argue that in the US there is a (artificially created) shortage of doctors, which makes them great money, while inflating everybody else's medical bills. So, if the labor shortage is experienced in an industry serving mostly for the local (US) and not the global market, it's not good for the people.
  - perfunctory 8y ago
    > (artificially created) shortage of doctors, which makes them great money, while inflating everybody else's medical bills Good point. I was just referring to the common usage of the phrase. When media talks about "labor shortage" they usually don't mean doctors.
4ntonius8lock 8y ago
It always amazes me that the same people who want the law of supply and demand to rule the costs of goods, housing and other things they control, are all of a sudden unable to deal with the law of supply and demand when it comes to labor... something they have to buy. Huh...
- hhffrgh 8y ago
  Fidesz isn’t the Republican Party. They aren’t advocating free market too much.
negamax 8y ago
The article gave the vibe that Hungary is economically doing well despite anti immigration stance. But young Hungarians leave the country in droves. They have fairly low GDP for EU. Just trying to understand if being nationalist is helping them economically at all or it’s just feel good, shut eyes to reality thing
- dmortin 8y ago
  The anti immigration thing is a political ploy by Orban, so he gets less informed people vote for him. He built a media propaganda machine which hammers the dangers of migrants day and night. Any kind of criticism against the government is deflected with the migration argument (those who criticize only want to bring in migrants), regardless of the current issue.
thrwaway190504 8y ago
Can someone clarify: the Hungary is in the EU, isn't it, meaning a single labor market? (Any EU citizen can start working without issue.) The article seems to contradict this...

In "The Next 100 Years," Friedman predicted that globally declining birth rates would lead states to start fighting to attract immigrants. That book is full of incorrect predictions that are nonetheless interesting. It's weird to see low unemployment correlated instead with nationalism.

hayksaakian 8y ago
>It's weird to see low unemployment correlated instead with nationalism. Why is it weird? Isn't it consistent with any historical period of mass migration?
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  It's not weird because I suggest there's no correlation. Hungary is losing a ton of workers because everywhere West of it pays a lot more. This is the first order issue, not local politics. Brexit would arguably be a rather nationalist form of action and the UK is a primary destination for Europeans, and others.
- brownbat 8y ago
  Weird because immigration directly helps alleviate labor shortages, not weird because it's ahistorical. Like when some people are sickest they are most likely to turn to pseudoscience rather than the actual science they need.

javagram 8y ago

This is a very interesting article. It shows both the benefits and the downside of this type of policy. > He tried recruiting workers from small villages, with scant success. So last year, he began to recruit deaf employees. He refitted his machines with blinking lights and retrained managers to work with deaf people. Mr. Katona has streamlined operations to improve efficiency, including adding more robotic machines. In a counterfactual situation where immigration continued, it seems like these Deaf people wouldn’t have been able to get jobs. On the other hand, the immigrants who couldn’t come are just as human and now lose the opportunity for the jobs. It makes it feel like a zero-sum situation, although I know that according to economic theory freedom including the freedom to migrate would allow greater efficiency and wealth for all.

benj111 8y ago
"allow greater efficiency and wealth for all." As far as I'm aware, migration increases wealth, I don't think its necessarily distributed evenly. That's where govt policy's should be stepping in.
dmortin 8y ago
> the immigrants who couldn’t come are just as human and now lose the opportunity for the jobs. Actually, Hungarian companies do bring immigrant workers form Ukraine, etc. despite what Orban preaches, but apparently it's not enough.
- Scoundreller 8y ago
  Cultural differences aside, neighbouring Ukraine has 4.5x the population with almost half the wages (adjusted for CoL/PPP). Hungary should be a slam dunk, no?
  - 29083011397778 8y ago
    The Ukrainian workers are more likely to go to Poland, due to better wages and friendlier immigration policies, according to the article
    - chewz 8y ago
      Also due to similarity of languages. After short time Ukrainians can speak Polish well enough to communicate with just a bit of Eastern accent.
  - dmortin 8y ago
    Maybe language is a problem, because Hungarian is pretty difficult to learn for foreigners, so I guess migrant workers can only be employed for simple jobs where language is not an issuse. I heard about foreign construction workers where the company added translators to the crew, so the construction manager can talk to the workers via the translator. I don't know how efficient this is in practice.

mnm1 8y ago

I bet there would be no shortages of workers if wages went up. But of course when the free market favors the workers, it must be regulated away. When the market favors employers, it's working as expected. The situation is the same here in the US. Idiot leader, massive corruption, economy growing, and labor "shortages." I wonder how long this condition will last before it collapses due to stupid, hateful policies. It won't be long now.

IdiocyInAction 8y ago
> I bet there would be no shortages of workers if wages went up. Indeed. The fact that there are so many high-wage countries around Hungary is one of the reasons why it has this problem anyway.
dmortin 8y ago
> I bet there would be no shortages of workers if wages went up. Multinational companies bring factories to Hungary, because labor is cheap. If wages go up then I guess many of those factories pack up and move east for other countries with lower wages. So wages should go up but then many jobs may disappear.
- gdhbcc 8y ago
  Sounds like the ideal scenario, no?
- Jorge1o1 8y ago
  And thus the labor shortage ends. Less jobs, higher wages. It’s just the markets at work mate.
skybrian 8y ago
Yes, people are attracted by higher wages, but if you put up barriers preventing them from taking the job, it prevents the market from working. The article is about a government putting up barriers preventing businesses from hiring workers. This is a regulatory barrier.

klenwell 8y ago

Those workers have yet to show up. And hundreds of thousands of young Hungarians who left in recent years for better-paying jobs in Europe’s big cities are not heeding Mr. Orban’s call to return and serve their homeland. The labor shortage has grown so acute that the government recently pushed through a contentious bill to address it. Widely referred to as the slave law, it allows employers to require up to 400 hours of overtime annually from its workers, while delaying compensation for up to three years. Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party promoted the measure as good for workers, saying it would let “those who want to work more earn more.” In America, we call these "right-to-work" laws. To my knowledge, none have gone this far yet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law

votepaunchy 8y ago
Unpaid or delayed pay for work has nothing to do with right-to-work and is illegal throughout America. The first paragraph from the cited link: “In the context of U.S. labor politics, "right-to-work laws" refers to state laws that prohibit union security agreements between companies and labor unions. Under these laws, employees in unionized workplaces are banned from negotiating contracts which require all members who benefit from the union contract to contribute to the costs of union representation.”
throwaway2016a 8y ago
This very much misrepresents Right to Work. I'm going to try to answer this without taking a side... The point of Right to Work is to prevent predatory unions from doing things like forcing people to pay dues to them or negotiating preferential treatment only to people who choose to pay dues. Or, say, go without pay during a strike when the worker may indeed rather be working. Of course, this can be a problem because it reduces the collective bargaining power of unions if an employee can simply refuse to strike. But at the same time, it also forces unions to be providing real material value in exchange for their dues since they now have to convince workers that it is worth paying dues instead of being able to extract dues in a mandatory way. You may be confusing what Right to Work is designed for with what opponents of it think will happen if union power is reduced.

rayiner 8y ago

This article wildly misrepresents Hungary’s new overtime law. The article makes it seem like employers can demand workers to work 400 hours of overtime and not pay them until 3 years later. The fact that it talks about the “perception” of the law rather than the actual legal provisions is telling. Here is what the law does: https://www.twobirds.com/en/news/articles/2019/hungary/new-controversial-rules-on-overtime-and-reference-period-in-hungary https://www.twobirds.com/en/news/articles/2019/hungary/new-c.... The law primarily regulates the terms of collective bargaining agreements. Most EU countries provide for such agreements to include a maximum amount of overtime for scheduled hourly workers. Some countries, like the US and Netherlands, don’t specify any maximum. The new Hungary law raises the overtime limit from 250 hours per year to 400. (France, for example, is 220. Norway is up to 400 by individual agreement. In California, there is no annual limit, but workers can’t be disciplined for not working more than 72 hours per week. The Netherlands has no annual limit, but a limit of 60 hours per week. In the new Hungary law, the maximum per week is 48.) The three years is not how long employers have to pay for the extra hours, but refers to the “reference period” in the collective bargaining agreement over which what counts as overtime is calculated. People must still be paid their hourly rate for those overtime hours. A reference period in excess of court months, moreover, can only be set forth in a collective bargaining agreement. Calling raising the limit on maximum overtime a “slave law” is propaganda, pure and simple. (Unless you subscribe to the notion that working for someone who privately owns the means of production is “wage slavery” but if that’s the case you should flag that premise to avoid misleading the reader.)

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Luc 8y ago
So an employer could make someone work 400 hours of overtime for a couple of years, yet never pay them the overtime rate. They could do this by reducing the employee's hours in the third year, so that averaged over 3 years no overtime was due. That sounds like a great deal... for the employer.
metafex 8y ago
Yes, the employers can and will try to pay out the overtime only after that time. And some are already trying to do just that. There have been large protests which the state media doesn't even cover at all and honestly, calling this propaganda is quite dishonest. Also workers are being "convinced" to sign agreements because otherwise they are out of a job. Source: Austrian with Hungarian partner, and with friends in Hungary.

jellicle 8y ago

> pays minimum wage: 5500 euros per year (USD $6100) > will not increase salaries > confused about why no workers > no one can figure it out > nobel prize if you can figure it out > let's write another story in the NYT about it > baffling

perfunctory 8y ago

"Labor Shortage" is just another example of framing. The word shortage suggests a problem. While there is no problem at all. "Labor Shortage" is actually very good for the majority of the population. I enjoy the shortage of software developers every day of my life. It's great.

4ntonius8lock 8y ago
I'm surprised we don't hear about 'cheap iphone shortage'. Somehow the laws of supply and demand are well fitted to price products (produced by those holding capital) but not labor (produced by ordinary people)
- damnyou 8y ago
  Yep, that's exactly right. Labor does not behave like ordinary goods.
damnyou 8y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy It's ok to be mistaken about this, the way labor markets behave isn't very intuitive. The important thing to note is that the higher order effects of labor supply overwhelm the first order ones.
badpun 8y ago
> "Labor Shortage" is actually very good for the majority of the population. It sort of depends. You could argue that in the US there is a (artificially created) shortage of doctors, which makes them great money, while inflating everybody else's medical bills. So, if the labor shortage is experienced in an industry serving mostly for the local (US) and not the global market, it's not good for the people.
- perfunctory 8y ago
  > (artificially created) shortage of doctors, which makes them great money, while inflating everybody else's medical bills Good point. I was just referring to the common usage of the phrase. When media talks about "labor shortage" they usually don't mean doctors.

4ntonius8lock 8y ago

It always amazes me that the same people who want the law of supply and demand to rule the costs of goods, housing and other things they control, are all of a sudden unable to deal with the law of supply and demand when it comes to labor... something they have to buy. Huh...

hhffrgh 8y ago
Fidesz isn’t the Republican Party. They aren’t advocating free market too much.

negamax 8y ago

The article gave the vibe that Hungary is economically doing well despite anti immigration stance. But young Hungarians leave the country in droves. They have fairly low GDP for EU. Just trying to understand if being nationalist is helping them economically at all or it’s just feel good, shut eyes to reality thing

dmortin 8y ago
The anti immigration thing is a political ploy by Orban, so he gets less informed people vote for him. He built a media propaganda machine which hammers the dangers of migrants day and night. Any kind of criticism against the government is deflected with the migration argument (those who criticize only want to bring in migrants), regardless of the current issue.

thrwaway190504 8y ago

Can someone clarify: the Hungary is in the EU, isn't it, meaning a single labor market? (Any EU citizen can start working without issue.) The article seems to contradict this...