Number of Hungarian Workers Decreasing in Austrian Labor Market

The number of Hungarians working in Austria has fallen for the fourth month in a row, reports Világgazdaság. It will soon be seen whether this is due to seasonality in the Austrian labor market or whether something has changed for good. It is important to note, however, that only full-time employees are registered and counted.

This marks the fourth month of a favorable labor market trend for Hungarians, a downward trend that started in August.

During this period, around 8,000 Hungarians have left Austria.

The statistics do not say where they are moving to, but the fact is that the number of the Hungarian community was still 126,656 at the end of the summer, but had fallen to 118,930 by the end of November. The biggest fall occurred in October, when 4,494 Hungarians left Austria in a single month. By comparison, November saw a much smaller, but still marked decrease: 994 persons decided to stop working for the Austrians, a drop of almost one percentage point.

A year ago, in 2022, only 111,410 Hungarians were registered in the Austrian labor market. This compares to 118,930 now, a narrow increase of seven percent. However, it is also worth pointing out that while there was a drop of around 1,000 between October and November 2023, only 385 people decided to leave between October and November 2022.

The decline in the number of Hungarian workers in Austria is mainly due to the cyclical nature of the Austrian labor market.

The most labor-intensive sectors are agriculture and tourism. The former is hibernating, the latter is starting to recover, with the winter season coming. It could well be that the main driving force behind the phenomenon of the rapid decline in the number of Hungarians in Austria, is the temporary redundancy of some of the workers who earn their living in these sectors.

The real deciding factor is December, when the ski season starts and the hospitality sector may need the extra manpower. Last year, the figures reflected this: between November and December, Austrian employers hired more than 1,000 new Hungarian workers. The question is whether this will be repeated this year.

There are plenty of examples in Austria of agencies specifically recruiting Hungarian workers. This is detrimental to the Hungarian economy, as there is a serious shortage of people in a number of mainly physical, manual jobs.

Therefore, the Austrian and Hungarian labor markets are in fierce competition with each other.

A good indication of the extreme number of Hungarian workers in Austria is the fact that in November, a total of 983,699 foreign workers were registered on the Austrian labor market. The domestic population of 118,930 therefore means that one in eight international workers in Austria was Hungarian. However, at least thanks to the decline, Hungarians are no longer the most numerous in Austria, as the number of Germans in the previous month almost reached 124,000.

Via Világgazdaság, Featured image via Pixabay