Prague, July 26 (CTK) – The Czech labour inspection authority revealed 3065 illegal employees, including 858 foreigners, last year, but the real number of illegally employed people in the country seems to be considerably higher, daily Pravo wrote on Tuesday.
Most of the illegal foreign workers were citizens of Ukraine and Vietnam, but also people from EU countries were among those whose employment was not legal, mainly from Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary.
The foreigners did not have either an official job contract or a permission to work in the Czech Republic. A part of them even did not have a valid permission to stay in the country, the paper writes.
The illegal labourers usually worked in construction firms, restaurants, shops, hostels or they had seasonal jobs such as fruit picking.
According to the report by the Labour and Social Affairs Ministry, about 200 inspectors carried out 9583 checks of 9044 firms or entrepreneurs in 2015. A firm that employs somebody illegally may be fined up to 10 million crowns, the report says.
Last year, the inspection authority imposed 573 fines of more than 81 million crowns in total. For the illegal employment of foreigners, firms were fined 16 million crowns, the paper writes.
The firms that have illegal employees in order to lower the costs of work often prefer being fined for not letting the labour inspectors enter their premises and they try to avoid paying the fines, the paper writes.
Most of the fines have not been paid because the firms hire lawyers, file complaints and challenge the findings of the inspectors. If the owners of the firm concerned are foreigners, they claim that they cannot be contacted by the inspection authority since they are abroad.
The labour inspection cooperates with immigration and customs officers during the checks of companies suspected of employing foreigners illegally.
In 2015, as many as 323,244 foreigners were legally employed in the Czech Republic, which was about 62,000 more than in 2014.
Nearly half of the foreign employees were Slovaks (150,317) and 95,016 were from other EU countries, mainly Poland (24,982), Romania (22,861) and Bulgaria (19,782). The number of legal employees from outside of the EU reached 77,911 last year. Most of them were from Ukraine (41,847), Russia (6703) and Vietnam (5098).
