Shortage of Workers

  • Ewald Walterskirchen

Up to 2005, businesses in Austria will require some 27,000 additional workers per year. In the past decades, skilled labour was easy to recruit because the working-age population grew by about 30,000 a year. But the economically active population will stagnate in the current decade and then decline by almost 30,000 annually between 2010 and 2030. Policy-makers are thus called upon to tap labour reserves (unemployed, older workers and women) and institute qualifying measures to make them fit for the labour market. If this should not suffice to cover the shortage, the number of foreign skilled workers needs to be raised.