Sardinian restaurants wait up to five months to hire a chef. Six in 10 Spanish nurses say they leave some care undone because they run out of time. Europe’s labour shortages have moved from spreadsheets into daily life, and new EU research suggests money is rarely what drives people away.

In Sardinia, a restaurant owner looking for a chef can wait almost five months. In two out of three cases, the problem is not poorly trained applicants. Nobody applies at all, according to the island’s branch of the Italian restaurant federation FIPE. More than half of the sector’s workers are on part-time contracts, and evening, weekend, and holiday shifts are the norm.

“When someone leaves, you don’t just lose an employee: you lose experience, training, quality of service, and competitiveness,” the federation says.

When someone leaves, you don’t just lose an employee: you lose experience, training, quality of service, and competitiveness. — FIPE Sardinia, Italian restaurant federation

The Sardinian kitchen is no exception. A new analysis by the EU’s working conditions agency Eurofound and the European Labour Authority (ELA), published on 12 October, looked at 436 occupations. For 97 per cent of them, at least one European country reported a shortage in 2025. Italy is worst off, with workers missing in about 60 per cent of occupations. The Netherlands, Bulgaria, Belgium, and Romania follow.

Heavy work, unsociable hours

Some jobs stay on the shortage list year after year. Welders, nurses, specialist doctors, plumbers, and heavy truck drivers appear in country after country. Researchers examined the 15 occupation groups with the most widespread shortages and checked them against seven measures of job quality, from earnings to working hours and physical strain.

The results challenge a common assumption. The most frequent problem is not pay but the physical environment. In 12 of the 15 occupation groups, workers face heavier physical risks than the EU average. Ten of them also score below average on working time, which covers night shifts, weekend work, and unpredictable schedules. Earnings fall below average in only two groups, cooks and personal care workers. Those two also fare worst overall, lagging behind in five of seven dimensions.

Truck drivers show the pattern clearly. A 2025 survey by the International Road Transport Union (IRU) found that drivers’ pay sits well above the cost of living and does not track shortage levels. What drivers want fixed is something else. Over 90 per cent asked for decent rest areas and better treatment at delivery sites. Meanwhile, drivers under 25 make up just 2.2 per cent of the workforce in Italy and 2.6 per cent in Germany.

In hospitals, the problem feeds itself. When staff are missing, those who remain work harder, burn out, and leave. In Spain, the largest study of nurses to date, with over 20,000 responses, found that almost four in 10 plan to quit within a decade and 17 per cent within two years. Temporary contracts raise the risk of leaving by a third. Six in 10 nurses say they skip some care because there is not enough time.

A law for better jobs

Brussels has noticed. On 13 October, the European Commission published its annual employment outlook, which concludes that shortages are often worst in poorer-quality jobs. Accommodation and food services sit at the bottom of the ranking, while finance and IT jobs sit near the top.

The Commission plans to put a Quality Jobs Act on the table by the end of 2026. Unions and employers had until 28 September to comment on its content. The law should cover health and safety at work, the use of algorithms to manage staff, and conditions in subcontracting chains. Whether it brings one directive or several separate rules remains open.

The EU is also looking outside its borders. The rules setting up the EU Talent Pool, a platform to match non-EU jobseekers with employers in shortage occupations, have applied since 1 June. Member states can choose whether to take part. Eurofound warns that recruitment alone cannot break the cycle if the jobs themselves stay unattractive.

Trained at home, hired abroad

Moving workers around Europe looks like an easy fix. For almost every shortage occupation, at least one other country in the EURES job-mobility network reports a surplus, the ELA’s data show. Europe, in other words, has the workers but cannot find them. Yet mobility has a downside, and Italy feels it most.

We are Europe’s training cash machine: we pick up the bill, others cash in by taking our professionals. — Antonio De Palma, president of Nursing Up

An Italian nurse earns on average €1,500–1,700 a month and pays for housing on her own. German recruitment schemes approach nursing students before they graduate, Italy’s nursing union Nursing Up reports. They offer language courses, housing, and starting salaries of €2,400–2,600 gross. Norway offers around €3,500 net. Italy, short of some 175,000 nurses by the union’s estimate, now looks for replacements as far away as Uzbekistan.

Training one nurse costs the Italian state around €30,000. With 6,000–7,000 nurses leaving every year, Italy hands its neighbours roughly €200m worth of skills annually.

“We are Europe’s training cash machine: we pick up the bill, others cash in by taking our professionals,” said Antonio De Palma, president of Nursing Up. His remedy is the one Eurofound points to as well: better pay and working conditions for the people already in the job.