At the end of February, Deputy Prime Minister and Ministers of the Interior Davor Božinović and Labor, Pension System, Family and Social Policy Marin Piletić presented amendments to the Foreigners Act at a press conference. Besides the stated goals that seem good at first glance, I regret that (at least for now) the opportunity to correct another deficiency of the current law – the one about the condition that for every four workers, one must be a domestic employee – is being missed.
I wrote about this in August last year, but the opportunity is such that I want to remind those responsible in the ministries of the existing problem once again. Specifically, it concerns companies seeking seasonal workers. At that time, I recounted a conversation I had with a fruit grower who lost a significant part of his yield last year. The reason was administrative – he did not have the right to a larger number of pickers from foreign countries because their engagement would make the number of domestic employees in the company less than a quarter of the total number of employees. As he explained to me then, according to the current Foreigners Act (Article 99, Paragraph 1, Item 3), it states that the employer will receive a positive opinion for the engagement of foreign workers from the regional office of the Croatian Employment Service, which will be forwarded to the relevant police administration or police station if, among other things, the employer meets the following condition: ‘In the last six months, there has been at least one employee who is a citizen of the Republic of Croatia or a citizen of a member state of the European Economic Area (EEA) or the Swiss Confederation employed on a permanent and full-time basis in the Republic of Croatia’ (Item 3).
Panic in the Season
The same applies to craftsmen (Paragraph 3), and in Paragraph 8, it is specifically determined how many foreign workers an employer can hire in relation to the number of domestic employees: ‘The regional office or the Croatian Employment Service will not issue a positive opinion if the number of employed workers who are citizens of the Republic of Croatia or citizens of a member state of the EEA or the Swiss Confederation with the employer is less than 1/4 of the total employed.’
Now, as that fruit grower told me, only he is employed in his company because there is no need for permanently employed people since he can take care of the fruit trees himself, with occasional engagement of a local person or a foreigner. He told me he has technology that helps him maintain everything, and possibly engages a craftsman as part of outsourcing. Throughout the year, he can meet the condition of hiring three foreigners alongside him as a permanently employed person, but what happens when the harvest time comes?! That’s when panic sets in, as it was last year. He could not engage domestic workers at all because none of the remaining locals (many have gone abroad in search of a better life) were interested. He only hired about ten of them later in the season, when the harvest was already well underway, but even that number of employees would not have been sufficient had he started with them from the beginning. He only hired three foreign workers, even though there were more interested foreigners for the harvesting job, but since the owner of the orchard was the only employee, he could not engage them because each subsequent foreigner would exceed the legal requirement of at least a quarter of permanently employed domestic workers.
