Car manufacturers crowding into central Europe are confronting higher demands for wages and fringe benefits as local skills shortages strengthen the hand of workers and unions, according to a report.
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Skoda Auto, the region’s biggest auto manufacturer, is facing down a union claim for a 17.0% increase this year for its 23,000 employees. Management has offered 6.1% over two years, albeit sweetened with an increasingly developed series of fringe benefits such as soft home loans, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported.
“Localised skills shortages are emerging as a one of the major issues for the auto industry in the Czech and Slovak republics,” PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Central European auto sector specialist Matt Pottle told AFP.
Pottle said he did not believe the skills problem will slow the $US6bn worth of auto production expected to relocate to central and eastern Europe over the next five years to take advantage of low, but fast accelerating, wages.
AFP noted that the Toyota-Peugeot-Citroen Automobile (TPCA) joint venture at Kolin, in the centre of the Czech Republic, has already provided negotiating ammunition for Skoda unions by agreeing an annual 7.5% increase for workers from April, taking average monthly pay to 23,000 koruna (EUR818.5, $1,084).
It is also boosting its fringe benefits, starting at 3,000 koruna a month.
Finding the 3,500 workers needed to produce 300,000 cars a year is not the problem. The problem is keeping them, TPCA spokesman Matej Matolin told Agence France Presse.
“There are an increasing number of investors coming into the Czech Republic and let’s say that the demand at the moment is higher than the offer on the labour market.”
“We would like to have a lower turnover of workers,” Matolin added.
In unemployment-plagued eastern Moravia, where Hyundai will produce 300,000 cars a year with 3,500 workers from 2011, the South Korean company says it will not initially match wages offered by its Czech-based rivals.
But this should change once cars start rolling off the production line in 2009 with wage reviews planned every six months, the report said.
“We are competing in the same labour market and will have to offer the same benefits as well,” spokesman Petr Vanek told AFP.
Hyundai wants to hire 600 staff by year end, half of them managers and half workers and technicians. So far, it has seen no signs of problems. “We have had 3,500 applications, most for the workers’ positions,” Vanek told AFP. “There is a whole army of unemployed people in this area,” he added.
Around 50 kilometres away, Slovakia’s third major auto manufacturer, Kia, has problems recruiting suitably qualified staff, local spokesman, Dusan Dvorak told AFP.
Immediate vacancies for shop floor assembly, construction, engine and painting jobs, are posted on the plant’s website, as well as a series of management posts. New manufacturing recruits, straight out of school, are paid 14,600 Slovak koruna (around EUR430, $568) a month.
Management at Peugeot’s Trnava plant in West Slovakia have adopted an active recruitment policy to fill 3,3000 posts, including cooperation with Bratislava’s Technical University and technical schools as well as nationwide trawls for talent at job fairs, Agence France Presse nored.
Among the fringe benefits boosting a worker’s average monthly wage of 15,000 koruna is an extra 1,500 koruna premium rewarding those who regularly turn up for work and individual bonuses. Company housing benefits can cover as much as half of the costs of renting a flat, the report added.
