ZAGREB – According to official Ministry of the Interior data, 95,678 residence and work permits for foreigners have been issued this year, of which 4,317 permits were issued to citizens of the Philippines.

Compared to 2021, when 60,943 residence and work permits were issued in the same period, in 2022 there was a noticeable increase in issued residence and work permits of 56.99 percent. As of September 30, 4,576 Philippine citizens had valid residence in Croatia, of whom 37 have valid permanent residence and 4,539 temporary residence. The largest number of Philippine citizens have approved temporary residence for the purpose of work, mostly in tourism, writes Novi list.

Since Croatia abolished quotas for employing foreign workers at the beginning of last year and introduced a labor market test that should make it easier for domestic employers to find foreign workers, an increasing inflow of foreign workers filling vacant jobs has been recorded.

– Some of the traditional pools we draw from for importing foreign workers, such as the markets of Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, and Serbia, are slowly becoming insufficient sources of quality labor. Although geographic proximity allows easier integration into the work environment, there are fewer and fewer workers in neighboring markets, and this trend leads to a gradual reliance on labor markets from Asia, in which workers from the Philippines play a key role, said Stjepan Jagodin in a statement, director of Pinoy385, an agency specialized in mediating the employment of workers from the Philippines.

The Philippine state agency for overseas employment and the Office for the Implementation of Overseas Employment require Croatian employers to provide a worker from the Philippines with equal working conditions to those enjoyed by their domestic colleagues in the same position.

Source: seebiz.eu