Alarmed Azem: Over 200 thousand workers abandoned Kosovo in the first quarter, nothing is being undertaken

That is how the chairman of the Independent Private Sector Union, Yusuf Azemi, in an interview for Kosova Prees, reveals that new statistics for the number of workers who have abandoned Kosovo are flocked by monitoring their flow through airports and bus lines.

Azem shows that over 90 percent of these workers have been employed in the private sector.

After our data, this figure is over 200 thousand workers. I know for someone it's a not too serious figure. But we still estimate that there are about 250 thousand workers in Kosovo's private sector, and it's very normal that over 250 thousand of us have had workers without employment contracts who haven't been counted. How did we get these statistics? We've actually made a visit on our own where we've taken the escape of workers who've gone out through the airport, the escape of the workers who've gone through the buses, and we've come up to a figure that is much larger to us. However, we've rounded it up in the first six quarters we have over 200 workers, or we can say over 200 thousand young people have left Kosovo... if we take it into balance, private sector workers with them, it's about 92 percent of the public sector”, Azemi says.

For Kosova Prees, Azemi points out that the lack of qualified workers is causing stagnation on many major projects.

The biggest move is on construction workers, because their flight has become twice as heavy. On one side qualified workers have found themselves much better there. And the other side is that workers in Kosovo, now to build a qualified company palace, and these people are missing. So the severe double flight, the flight of qualified people and the lack of qualified workers for which many projects, including roads and large, are on the stage because of the lack of qualified workers”, points to Azem.

He says no action is taking to stop this flight trend.

We can say it's much bigger running this year than previous years of procedure to leave. Yet, even past years have not been worse. On average, 40,000 to 60 thousand workers (going abroad) had 2022 and 2023. We have an escape that no one is crying about. We've proposed to sit down as a government partner, employers that we at least offer them what we can... they haven't been interested, but in fact this fracture is definitely paying Kosovo, but the main one is paying off the owners of companies that haven't been at the right level in relation to workers”, Azemi says.