I'm David Poyser, a journalist, and welcome to the 12th episode of PezPod, the Insiders Guide to the Pez Network, made for European Pez.

We've talked a lot about unemployment in these podcasts, but today instead we're going to talk about labour shortage.

It's a problem across Europe, obviously in

some countries more than others and in some sectors more than others. Luckily today I'm

with Dr Tina Weber from Eurofound, the EU-funded Europe-wide employment research organisation based

in Dublin. Tina's written recent reports on this and has contributed to the recent PES Network Conference on this.

Hi, Tina, are you there?

Hi, David. It's a pleasure to be with you.

Thanks. And I'm also with Hawken Hertzberg from the Norwegian Pess.

And he has to solve these issues on the ground

in his job and the Norwegian Pess. Are you there,

Hocken? Yes, I'm here. Thank you. So, Tina, first of all, could you give us a sort of overview?

I think it's more the construction sectors and the health sector. Is that right?

Well, labour shortages have been a problem for quite some time.

In fact, after the last recession, so after 2008 and starting from around 2013, this has become an increasing problem in a number of sectors and occupations.

You know, a lot of sectors have shut down. This problem has gone away, but in fact, in a number of sectors like healthcare like ICT where demand

increased during the pandemic the problem has only become worse and now as we're

emerging from the pandemic there are sectors that suffered from labour shortages prior to COVID that are experiencing

even greater shortages now. And there are some where the problem maybe wasn't so significant,

where things are getting worse now, for a number of reasons that I'm sure we can talk about.

And that's the problem, that's the easy bit in a sense, isn't it? What about the solutions? I think

the Romanians have had some success, is that right? And I think the Germans in the health sector.

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