Foreigners, mostly from Ukraine, make up an increasing share of staff at Lithuania’s bars and restaurants. But that’s just a temporary solution, say employers, while politicians insist it is the low pay that is keeping people out.
The Business and Hospitality Career Centre in Vilnius trains people to be pastry chefs, cooks, bartenders, waiters and for many other positions in catering and hospitality. Trainees in all specialities are growing, those training to be bartenders and waiters alone have doubled in a couple of years.
“We used to have about 50, now we have about 100 full-time students,” says Saulius Zybartas, head of the Business and Hospitality Career Centre. “Of course, this is not enough for Vilnius, for example. In Vilnius, I understand, up to 300 could be hired this minute.”
According to the Employment Service, restaurants, cafes, and bars across Lithuania were advertising around 3,000 vacancies in March. In addition to bartenders, there is a shortage of cooks, kitchen workers, and dishwashers.
Gediminas Balnis, head of Amber Food, one of the largest restaurant groups in the country, says that in some restaurants foreign staff already outnumber Lithuanians.
“More [foreigners] work in Vilnius. There are also a lot of [foreign] employees in Klaipėda and Kaunas. In small towns, Lithuanians are still more numerous, but in the whole company, we have 270 foreigners out of 1,300 employees. Most of them work in the kitchen,” Balnis told LRT TV.
Ukrainians are by far the biggest nationality, besides Lithuanians, as around 70,000 have arrived in Lithuania since the start of the Russian invasion. However, employers realise many of them will return home once Ukraine is safe.
The ageing population in Lithuania, therefore, remains a long-term problem, they say.
“If fewer people enter the labour market every year than retire, where are the workers going to come from?” asks Balnis rhetorically.
Employer groups have been lobbying the government to loosen up Lithuania’s strict immigration policies. However, the government insists that with around 100,000 unemployed in the country at the moment, firms should not rely on foreigners to fill up their vacancies. For one, they say, employers should be more open about hiring older people.
Employers insist there is no age discrimination, but catering naturally attracts only young people.
“I don’t know why, maybe there is an attitude [...] that a restaurant needs young, energetic people,” says Gabrielė Stankevič, a student at the Business and Hospitality Career Centre.
Vytautas Šilinskas, deputy minister of social security and labour, has another theory: low wages. It is not that labour in general is in short supply, only cheap labour.
“The catering and hospitality sector is, unfortunately, by far the lowest paid. Last year, the average salary of people was less than 1,000 euros before tax. That’s less than 700 euros [a month],” Šilinskas stresses.
Employers need to try harder, he adds: “They need to attract workers from other sectors, not just from other restaurants. It is perhaps an unusual situation for them to have to compete for workers.”
He rejects criticism from firms that it is too difficult to bring in workers from abroad and that the government should loosen regulation.
Šilinskas agrees, however, that Lithuania should consider what kind of immigration policy it wants to pursue: attracting short-time workers or people who would stay and will need to be integrated into the country’s social as well as economic life.
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