“130,000 workers left Kosovo in 202”

That's what they say from the Kosovo Private Sector Union.

Yusuf Azemi, chairman of this union, says the number has doubled by 2023.

And according to our average numbers, about 130 thousand young people and workers from Kosovo have left, while in 2023 we have a figure that exceeds 60 thousand workers, who have left their jobs and fled outside”, he said.

Azmi has stressed that concerns were raised by this union years ago.

We've really warned these concerns 2-3 years ago because we knew liberalisation would happen, we knew that opening borders would be good for workers on the individual side, but it would be bad for domestic Kosovo, but we can also say that saving private sector workers in Kosovo is visa liberalisation, given that with this opening, the position of the worker in the private sector is better for 80 percent, than it used to have been” it highlighted for the Expo.

It shows why citizens are leaving Kosovo.

The main directory is wages, and even those who have very good salaries cannot support families and cannot hold a four-member family. If it were not for visa liberalisation, the state of workers in the private sector would be as miserable as it was before, but the fate of disaster is that people are already choosing where they will be better off and if one of our employees has gone abroad, after many years of working here, could think of a marriage and a house, while if he is in Kosovo, even if he has a 1,000 euros wage, he cannot think of these two basic things as operating”, says Azem.

According to him, the state has done nothing for private sector workers.

The state for private sector workers since post-war has done nothing. Absolutely. We have constantly sought better conditions for these workers, we have demanded that the minimum wage be as long as it is in the region, we have demanded that the law and collective agreement be implemented. Seeing all of this, the goal was to move out, and many of them had experience here and left, except that they went with their family, and actually we had a better situation than we had before”, he estimated Yusuf Azem.

He stresses that the most affected sectors from the departure of workers are construction and gastronomy.

The largest number of workers who have fled are from the construction and gastronomy sector and then other sectors, which have left vacant seats in Kosovo. As for wing workers, there are still in Kosovo, but in professional areas there is a lack of”, Azemi has declared.