The critical sectors of tourism, construction, and agri-food are facing a severe shortage of over 200,000 workers. This shortage is particularly threatening the survival of the primary production sector in Greece, as producers, unable to meet the demands of their crops, are reducing the amount of land under cultivation.

Efforts to secure labor, mainly through transnational agreements, have not been successful. Farmers and stockbreeders find the process from applying for a worker to actually bringing them to the field so complicated that it often results in losing the worker in a maze of bureaucracy.

For the 2023-24 period, a ministerial decision allocated 113,467 posts for the primary sector, but 246,215 applications were submitted. Specifically, for seasonal workers in the primary sector, there were 91,630 posts, yet 168,609 applications were submitted, highlighting the significant demand. Additionally, vacancies in dependent employment are estimated at 70,000.

The shortage of farm workers is perhaps the most pressing issue facing Greek agriculture, says Dimitris Sofologis, agronomist and president of the Panhellenic Federation of Agricultural Associations. He notes that this shortage has even led to the abandonment of farms and farmland.

Yannis Gaitanis, President of the Agricultural Association of Ierapetra, echoes this sentiment. He explains that every year, more acres of agricultural land are abandoned because farmers lack the necessary staff to cultivate them. “We are growing, for example, fewer tomatoes, which means more imports and higher costs for all of us.”

Gaitanis also describes the cumbersome process of bringing in farm workers from third countries. In the Ierapetra region alone, more than 3,000 people have been called in the last four years, but approvals have not exceeded 200. Farmers pay a fee of 300 euros for each worker they request for a five-year or two-year employment program. “For fees alone, farmers in Ierapetra have paid nearly 1 million euros. We start with the application to the Decentralized Administration. Depending on the department’s staffing, approval can take either 15 days (in Heraklion) or up to 3 months (in Lasithi).”

Once approved, applications are sent to the embassies of the third countries involved in the agreements. However, the majority of these applications are rejected for non-essential reasons. “We don’t dispute rejections for security or health issues, but what’s the point of an inter-state agreement when 100% of requests from Pakistan and 90% from India and Bangladesh are rejected?” Gaitanis asks. He adds, “Crete alone currently needs more than 5,000 land workers. We have no people to work in the fields and are forced to stop growing crops.”

Agreements without impact

Six ministries are involved in the recruitment process for farm workers through intergovernmental agreements: Interior, Foreign Affairs, Labour, Immigration and Asylum, Citizen Protection, and Rural Development, which assists farmers. “There is no efficiency and, crucially, no coordinator to ensure the system works,” says Christos Giannakakis, vice-president of the Union of Agricultural Cooperatives and a peach and cherry producer in Imathia.

“Despite efforts and proclamations, transnational agreements for farm worker transfers are not effective. Some countries are cut off for various reasons; for instance, in Bangladesh, there is no embassy, so applicants must go to New Delhi, where they aren’t prioritized. The situation with Egypt hasn’t normalized either. Applications reveal discrepancies between candidate details and requirements,” he explains. “We pay fees up to 300 euros, depending on the employment duration, but workers don’t arrive. If they do, we’re entangled in bureaucracy to get them social security and tax numbers so they can work.”

The worker shortage has also driven up wages. “I have to pay more to workers, which means selling at higher prices, otherwise I incur losses,” says Giannakakis. “Production is down due to the climate crisis and EU ‘green deal’ regulations limiting pesticide use, while costs are rising due to several factors, including labor. This results in more expensive products for consumers.”

No production sector is unaffected by the worker shortage, Sofologis notes. Seasonal harvesting needs are generally higher, but certain times demand even more labor, such as during apple thinning (discarding excess fruit to improve yield). Without enough workers, farmers reduce cultivated areas each year. “This issue deters young people from continuing farming, even if they inherit ready farms from their fathers. At best, they reduce crop sizes, leaving fertile land unused,” Sofologis says.

Vietnamese workers at a hotel in Santorini

Tourism sector

Less than a month into the tourist season, seasonal workers are quitting their jobs, either lured by higher salaries elsewhere or unable to endure the grueling work hours. Hoteliers in Crete and Rhodes are poaching employees from hotels in Halkidiki with promises of an extra 200-300 euros and a longer season.

The staff shortage has reached a critical level, especially now that hotels are operating at full capacity.

According to the Panhellenic Federation of Hoteliers, there are 53,000 job vacancies in the hotel industry, and when combined with the catering sector, the total reaches 80,000. In 2023, one of the best years for tourism, one in five positions remained unfilled.

“Seasonal workers are working 15-hour days without any days off,” says George Hozzoglou, president of the Panhellenic Federation of Tourism and Catering Workers. “Housekeepers are especially unhappy, often quitting at night because they are forced to clean 25 rooms per shift due to the staff shortage. Just the other day, a worker in Chania fainted from exhaustion. Even employers who previously protected their staff are now pushing them to work nonstop. It’s no wonder they leave before the end of the month.”

Vangelis Kanellopoulos, head of WorkInGreeece platform

“Every day we count staff losses because someone else is offering a higher salary. Bidding has become too much this year, a tactic that doesn’t bring new jobs and increases the cost of doing business. Eight out of ten hotels report staff shortages. There are no chefs, cooks, receptionists, maids, gardeners. We have increased wages in order to attract or retain staff. Wages no longer fall below EUR 1 300 gross for six days’ work under any circumstances. The recruitment of workers from third countries has not solved the problem, as it takes at least three months to obtain a visa, while decentralised administrations take much longer to approve the requests of companies. This year we have reached out through NGOs to people with temporary political asylum and temporary residence permits, mainly from Asia and Africa, who live in shelters to work as gardeners and laundresses. But there are difficulties in language and in building trust with both employers and structures. In most cases they leave the job and return to the shelter where they have a bed and a plate of food”, says the president of the Halkidiki Hotel Owners Association, Gregory Tasios.

Indicative of the problem is that more than 2,000 tourism businesses said they are looking for staff through the JOBmatch platform of the Public Employment Service (DYPA), which operates to link unemployed people with tourism employers. On the other hand, 13,000 citizens said they were looking for work and 16,600 interviews have already been conducted. This does not mean, of course, that a corresponding number of recruitments have been made, as some advertisements show that employers’ requirements are not far from blackmail.

A cry of desperation

The cry of desperation at the lack of staff can be heard in all sectors of the economy, in the fields, tourism, catering, industry, construction, technical professions, nursing and of course in IT, where companies are chasing programmers in every possible way to persuade them to leave their competitors.

In the primary sector, there is a shortage of 70 000 farm workers: olives, vines, greenhouses, peaches and strawberries.

Add to this the shortage of workers in construction, a sector where the needs will multiply as a result of projects and investments, and the total number of vacancies is 200 000.

Recently, the new President of SEV, Spyros Theodoropoulos, pointed out that “90,000 jobs are missing in industry, especially in technical specialities. Every year 10,000 jobs will be created in the technology and IT sector. Yet there are no suitable workers. Either because many have gone abroad or because we need to cultivate the necessary skills.”

But even in the booming construction sector workers are nowhere to be found (an estimated 12,000 hands are missing). Most of the Albanian workers who supported construction in previous years have now become contractors, while the rest have left the country.

According to the figures of the DYPA, we are short of drivers, cooks, forklift and excavator operators, welders, electricians, plumbers, general maintenance workers and salesmen. At the level of specialised skills, serious shortages are recorded for accountants – tax advisers, it is very difficult to find programmers, while there is also a need for specialised IT staff.

A recent study by Ernst & Young Greece and SEV shows that the most important challenge by far is human resources (73%). In particular, companies are concerned about the prospects of finding specialised human resources with specific experience and knowledge (85%), but also unskilled or entry-level human resources with basic skills and qualifications (62%).

The problem of staff shortages is not only affecting Greece but all developed countries. Globally, according to a PwC survey, almost half (45%) of employees complain that their workload has increased significantly in the last year, while more than one in four (28%) say they are very or extremely likely to change employers in the next 12 months.

At the same time, the number of calls from third countries to fill vacancies seems like a drop in the ocean. Last year 9,000 applications were approved and in the end only 300 people were able to work due to bureaucratic obstacles. However, the Ministry of Immigration and Asylum, with a new minister, Mr. Nikos Panagiotopoulos, which was recently visited by the Prime Minister, underlining the exemplary work that has been done, is in the process of reaching agreements for the transfer of workers from third countries. The next step is the signing of six bilateral labour mobility agreements with friendly countries such as Armenia, Georgia, Moldova, Vietnam, the Philippines and India. We already have a bilateral agreement with Egypt and Bangladesh.

Special places

Which positions are foreign workers required to fill? According to the lists compiled by the regions, in construction and industry, specialised jobs (e.g. forklift operators) are most in demand, while in tourism, mainly in Attica, the southern Aegean, Crete and the Dodecanese, there is a need to fill vacancies for maids, cooks, waiters and buffet assistants. In addition, foreign workers have been requested for carers for the elderly and disabled.

The delays on the part of the embassies are also highlighted by Mr Vangelis Kanellopoulos, head of WorkInGreece, the online platform created to promote the recruitment of workers from third countries. So far 1,500 companies have requested staff through the platform, where 22,000 CVs have been posted, many of which are already working in our country.

“WorkInGreece draws workers from 12 countries (Vietnam, Bangladesh, Bangladesh, India, Egypt, Georgia, Indonesia, Moldova, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines, Thailand) by leveraging high-level technologies such as AI and social media to help businesses find not only low-skilled but also skilled workers. Vietnam in particular is our first preference because it has good, low-key craftsmen who behave with respect and courtesy, while our embassy there runs the processes quickly,” Kanellopoulos stresses.

On the other hand, unemployment may have decreased (estimated to close at 10.6% in 2024) and it is reasonable that vacancies are increasing, but it is still hovering at high levels among young people and women. The bottom line, however, is that for every vacancy there are 2-3 unemployed people. That is, if the vacancies were filled, the unemployment rate would fall overnight to 7.2%, a lower level than in 2008 when it was 8%!
To the burning question of why the vacancies are not being filled, experts say that the main reasons are as follows: low wages and poor working conditions, migration abroad, young people refusing to take up farming and manual work, problematic skills matching (i.e. the skills employers are looking for do not match the qualifications of the unemployed), poor linkages between the labour market and education, discrimination on the basis of age, gender or disability, and spatial mismatches between the areas where jobs are located and where the unemployed live.

For their part, the Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Employment and Social Affairs, seeing the demographic bombshell negatively affecting the labour market, in addition to the continuous effort to improve and match the skills of the unemployed, are aiming to increase the number of women in the labour market and, more generally, to bring back part of the population, such as retired people, in order to contain the loss of labour force.