“Odeta Bložienė, the head of the company Burokėlis ir krapas, which manages a chain of eight restaurants and employs almost 150 people, says that the situation of employees is becoming complicated.
"Staff shortages are inhumane and abnormal," she said at a meeting of the Seimas.
O. Bložienė announced that she had already come up with a new position - a junior waiter who would perform unskilled work - bring food to customers, take away dishes, clean tables: "We invite students from 16 years of age to work."
She stressed that due to staff shortages, some of the company’s restaurants are no longer open on weekends.
End of quote.
Cruel, people want to feed, but can’t. Even in the Seimas, we have to complain about how bad workers do not go to work for the public good, and the Employment Service does not serve them in any way.
We shed a tear and go to rekvizitai.lt. The median salary of Burokėlis ir krapas, as published on this website, is EUR 933.43 before taxes. We deduct taxes and have about € 634 left in our hands. In Vilnius. The average price of a pizza offered by the company is 8-9 euros and the waiter has to deliver these dishes to hungry customers.
I'm afraid to think about how much the "younger waiters" earn.
For comparison - rental prices. 1-room apartments in Vilnius cost about 330–350 euros per month, in Kaunas - about 290 euros, in Klaipėda - about 240 euros. Add housing maintenance to this amount.
In June 2021, apartment sales prices in Vilnius and Kaunas grew at the same rate - 2.1 percent, the average price per square meter reached 1871 Eur (+39 Eur / sq. M) and 1313 Eur (+27 Eur / sq. M), respectively. In Klaipėda, Šiauliai and Panevėžys, 1.6 per cent and 1.9 per cent, respectively, were recorded in June. and 1.3 percent. increase in apartment prices, the average price per square meter rose to 1290 Eur (+20 Eur / sq. m), 875 Eur (+16 Eur / sq. m) and 851 Eur (+11 Eur / sq. m), respectively.
We can talk a lot, demand a lot from everyone around us, but no Employment Service will make a person work virtually for nothing. Burokėlis ir krapas is neither a better nor a worse company than many others. There are a lot of companies that want to pay like a few years ago. Especially in a province where there are few alternatives to choose a job. This sometimes gives the impression that people do not need money, they do not go to work, and even the director, running around the town and villages with a new car for 100 thousand euros cannot recruit staff. But the truth is somewhat different. People don’t need salaries from which they can’t really make a living and build their future.
Just everyone sees that every week the store’s bill is getting bigger, even though the shopping cart doesn’t change, so you have to think about how to improve your livelihood. Even an intuitive person who has scored points and calculated that a few months of work a year in Norway will allow to bring more to the family than a few hours of work to a Lithuanian company chooses what is more convenient for him.
Let’s go back to the apartments and who buys them. Corporate accounts break down from the euros when services and goods become more expensive by the hour. To protect their money, shareholders buy anything that, from a long-term perspective, can maintain at least the same purchasing power of money. In this case, one such option is real estate in metropolitan areas, which is likely to not only become more expensive due to inflation, but renting it will be possible to obtain even a small but stable income.
There is no easy way out. Businesses are in no hurry to raise wages because of a lot of uncertainty and a bleak future. People, in turn, are in no hurry to work for money that does not ensure a normal livelihood. Inflation makes its adjustments.
The state can try to "smooth out" this chaos. There are several ways to do this. One is to increase the minimum wage, the other is to increase the wages of public sector workers so that there is pressure and wages rise everywhere, not only in big cities but also in districts. However, so far most state-aided projects do not address average wages and job creation.
The sad news is that there are more and more signs that the economic situation is abnormal and there is a "shake-up" ahead. No one can say exactly what it will be, because crisis scenarios are not repetitive, but the inflationary crisis has already begun. We will not stop the rise in prices, but the government will have to react to the fall in people's living standards, otherwise we may have a social explosion.
No, raising taxes and fees will not help here. Also not helping is a symbolic increase in the income of the poorest. A better strategy is to look for ways to increase, rather than destroy, the middle class, which ensures the stability of state in the modern world. So far, practically every day, state leaders talk about new taxes for employees, but see no effort, say, to limit state and bureaucratic expenses, to pull public administration and civil service reform from a deep drawer, to put the public procurement system in order.
It is proposed to increase the basic amount on the salaries of politicians, judges of general competence and judges of specialized courts, civil servants, employees of state and municipal budget institutions by four euros.
To put it mildly, the proposal is more like a mockery than a solution to the problem. Annual consumer prices in September compared to the corresponding period in 2020 according to the preliminary estimates of the Department of Statistics, it increased by 6.3 per cent. Simply put, a person has lost 63 euros out of every thousand euros. The wages of most workers have already depreciated far more than the government promises to increase.”
