site.bta340 Foreign Workers Posted to Bulgaria in 2016

340 Foreign Workers Posted to Bulgaria in 2016

Sofia, March 31 (BTA) - For January and February 2017, the General Labour Inspectorate (GLI) received applications from foreign employers for actual start of work in Bulgaria of 81 workers posted from other EU Member States or third countries, most of whom from Spain, Romania and Belarus, Daniela Kadiiska, Director of the GLI International Labour Migration Directorate, told a news conference here on Friday.

Construction is the principal economic sector to which workers are posted, and this year this is the subsector of building Sofia's Metro. Workers have also been posted to engineering activities.

A total of 340 foreign workers, including 250 EU citizens, were posted to Bulgaria in 2016. The largest number came from Germany, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Romania. Until the end of last year, information on posted workers was collected by the National Employment Agency, and as required by amended legislation, such data are gathered by the GLI as from 2017, Kadiiska specified.

Last year the GLI conducted nearly 500 checks of the lawful posting of Bulgarian workers abroad in the framework of the provision of services. The most frequent violations were non-compliance with the requirements for minimum working conditions in the host Member State. As from this year, employers are not only obliged to contract these conditions but also to pay the posted worker the minimum wage in the host country for the position occupied by him or her.

A project on Control of Posted Workers under Operational Programme Human Resource Development, which was started this month and will continue until December 2018, was presented at the news conference. The project costs 650,000 leva, of which 552,000 leva are provided by the European Social Fund and 97,500 leva is national co-financing. A single official national website for foreign employers, covering the relevant Bulgarian legislation and providing access to a register with the information under the transposed Posted Workers Directive, will be developed under the project.