With its 1,100 beds spread over three buildings, the Komitat South workers' hostel is a veritable melting pot of cultures. Nepalese, Indian, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan... On a day in mid-March, immigrants largely from Asia streamed continually in and out of the dormitories, which have cameras and security and are located in a residential suburb of the Romanian capital. "I arrived six months ago to work for [the delivery service] Glovo," said Naresh Chaudhary, a 38-year-old Nepalese man, between phone calls to his mother back home from the room he shares with three other Nepalese workers.

Chaudhary, who is also a father, said that he earns twice as much as he would in Nepal to deliver hot meals to the people of Bucharest, who have gradually become accustomed to deliverymen who don't speak a word of Romanian. "This is the first time I've been here," said Chaudhary, who previously worked in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia. Like all his neighbors, it was "thanks to a recruitment agency" that he arrived in this Eastern European country, which is facing a sharp labor shortage due to the departure of millions of its own residents to Western Europe since its accession to the European Union in 2007.

Beside him, Sherpa Pemba, 32 and also from Nepal, admitted that he had never heard of Romania before arriving, but said he found the "Romanians friendly." However, he was quickly disillusioned by his working conditions. Even though he works more than 11 hours a day for Glovo, he can never manage to land enough delivery orders to exceed the minimum income required by his employer. "I still haven't been able to send any money home to my family," he complained, despite a contract that guaranteed him a monthly salary of €550.

Workforce problem

"They should spend more time in the city center to receive more orders," argued Valeriu Nicolae, the director general of Komitat, the company that runs the hostel, as a response to these complaints, which he claimed are "isolated cases" within the more than 120,000 non-European foreigners now resident in Romania. This former diplomat bet well when, in 2016, he founded his private dormitory company, which offers Romanian companies accommodation for their workers for just €6 a night. Komitat now provides accommodation for over 4,000 workers, most of them Asian, who work "in Marriott Hotels, at McDonald's or at Delhaize supermarkets."

Long completely closed to all forms of immigration, Romania, like most other Central and Eastern European countries, has opened up to foreigners in recent years under pressure from employers complaining of historic recruitment difficulties, worsened even further after the post-Covid-19 economic rebound. "With 6 million Romanians working abroad and a falling birth rate, we have a serious problem in terms of the active population for our economy," said Romulus Badea, a partner at Soter, a tax consultancy that has developed a thriving international recruitment business to meet their needs.

You have 54.38% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.