Zsuzsanna Czeizel told herself she’d never work again after she retired in 2012. But since October, she’s held a job — scanning boxes of sweets in a large warehouse near Budapest.
The 65-year-old pensioner is one of a growing number of retirees hired by companies in eastern Europe desperate for workers. Economic growth and an exodus of millions workers to richer parts of the European Union have left gaping holes in local labour markets.
Companies have hiked wages and some turned to automation or acquiring rivals. But for Laszlo Tamasi, who runs a sweets retailer on the outskirts of Budapest, robots are no use — they can’t serve walk-in customers.
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So he hired Ms. Czeizel, and four other pensioners, finding them through cooperatives that help retirees get jobs.
“In the past two years, we have employed a growing number of pensioners because of the labour shortage,” said Mr. Tamasi, whose company, SIXI 2000 Kft, had an average turnover of about 4 billion forints ($14.3 million) in recent years. His pensioners are just five of the 75,000 that government figures show are employed in Hungary, one of the poorest members of the EU. Budapest hopes their ranks could double this year after tax cuts were offered in January to make it cheaper for companies to hire them.
Official statistics showed 2.6 million Hungarians, or about a quarter of the population, received a monthly pension of 117,485 forints ($420) on average last year.
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If they go back to work, they get to keep both the pension and whatever they earn. Hungary’s average take-home pay for full-time workers is 217,600 forints.
Economic model, nearing limits
Prime Minister Viktor Orban, whose government has refused to take in immigrants from the WestMiddle East and Asia over fears of a lasting change to Hungary’s cultural and ethnic make-up, has said the country has effectively run out of workers.
“Even in the longer run ... being the size that we are, the number of people willing and able to work in Hungary will remain between 4.5 million and 5 million,” Mr. Orban told a news conference last month.
Vacancies posted on the Hungarian jobs board profession.hu already reflect a degree of desperation by some businesses. A number of openings are aimed at “career starters, experienced professionals, or even pensioners.”
Discount supermarket chain Penny Market posted warehousing jobs targeting pensioners last month. The Hungarian unit of the freight transport company Rail Cargo Group was looking for engine drivers, including pensioners willing to work part-time.
Magdalena Rokonai’s company employs about a dozen pensioners in a call centre in the eastern Hungarian town of Miskolc, doing phone surveys for market research companies and pollsters. She says the labour market has been getting increasingly difficult.