Woman, aged over 50, lives in Latgale, has a secondary vocational education, and previously worked as a sales assistant in a retail shop. According to the latest data from the State Employment Agency, this is a statistical description of the unemployed in Latvia.
Although unemployment is decreasing overall, and at 5.3% it is even lower than the EU average, Latgale is significantly behind in almost all statistical measurements, e.g. the number of long-term unemployed in Latgale is even six times higher than in the rest of Latvia. There are also more pre-retirement unemployed and unemployed with disabilities in Latgale than elsewhere.
"At the beginning, it was very difficult with job opportunities. I was looking for a job in Rēzekne for a very long time," says resident Jolanta.
After 20 years of working in Rīga and its vicinity, Jolanta moved to her hometown of Rēzekne last year and spent about a year looking for a job. Jolanta is now one of 150 employees who will work in the newly opened Bite Rēzekne office.
The State Employment Agency (NVA) has helped Bite's Rēzekne office to find employees. Although there are many unemployed people in Rezekne, finding suitable candidates has not been easy, confirms Evita Simsone, Director of the State Employment Agency.
"Statistics are one thing, but when you have a company with specific needs, when you have to start looking for employees with specific requirements, then it becomes more challenging," she explains.
Nevertheless, the Director of the NVA encourages other entrepreneurs to take a step toward the region: "This will help the region to grow and develop. And these 150 people will not leave Latgale, Rēzekne. They will stay here, they will build their lives here, their children will grow up here, so this is an important contribution to the development of the region."
When looking for a place to expand, Bite saw the high unemployment rates in Latgale as an opportunity, i.e. more potential employees. However, there were other difficulties that would have been easier to deal with in the capital, says Arunas Mickevičius, General Director of Bite Latvija.
"The choice of office space was not the easiest task. While in Rīga we could choose from 100 potential office spaces, in Rēzekne we had to choose between a few options," he adds.
Could the opening of regional offices in Latgale by large companies be a new trend or rather exceptional cases? It depends on the offer, says Jānis Endziņš, Chairman of the Board of the Latvian Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
"If an entrepreneur sees that he has a significantly better tax regime, if he also sees that the region has generally lower wages, which means that they will be able to pay a little less for something if unemployment rates are high, and if there are adequate infrastructure facilities - office space if it is a service business or production space if it is production at an adequate and competitive price - then there will be investors," Endziņš believes.
One of the biggest "carrots", so to speak, for attracting entrepreneurs to Latgale is the special economic zones (SEZ).
No other region in Latvia has the same coverage of special economic zones as Latgale with special tax incentives, including up to 100% real estate tax rebate, 80% corporate income tax rebate, and other benefits. Currently, 22 commercial companies operate in the Rēzekne SEZ and 29 in the Latgale SEZ.
However, business growth does not necessarily mean more jobs.
For example, although the Rēzekne Special Economic Zone saw a surge in both exports and investment last year, with one company even expanding, the total number of people working in Rēzekne SEZ companies fell by 58 last year. Maija Elksne-Meirāne, Rēzekne SEZ Manager, explains the reasons:
"These jobs have not been lost from one company, but on average for several companies it is one or two jobs. This is mostly due to the digitization, automation and optimization of business processes. It should also be mentioned that some companies had employees from Ukraine. Recently, speaking to a representative of one company, he said that out of 50 Ukrainian employees, only 10 have remained in the company, the rest have moved on either to Rīga or Germany."
The Investment and Development Agency of Latvia sees high-tech companies as the flagships of Latvian exports. This is also confirmed by the Latgale SEZ, where two fiber optic companies in Līvāni generate the highest per capita gross domestic product in Latgale.
The Rezekne SEZ companies also see the near future marked by new, highly skilled jobs - network cable component manufacturer OptoElektronika will open a new production facility in Rēzekne in mid-October with several dozen jobs, and birch plywood manufacturer Verems is expanding its production facility and plans to create up to 70 new jobs.
Are such high-tech companies interested in the long-term unemployed of pre-retirement age? Probably not, so no significant changes are expected in the long-term unemployment rates in Latgale, but the expansion of border enterprises could prevent the outflow of able-bodied people to Riga or abroad in search of work and encourage young families to settle in Latgale.
