This summer season, Polish bakery group Putka began providing English lessons to ease communication amongst its swelling worldwide workforce.
Situated on the western outskirts of Warsaw, the corporate has struggled to draw locals and has turned to staff from nations as various as Senegal, India and Colombia, who now account for half its 500-strong manufacturing workforce.
Chief government Grzegorz Putka, the fourth era of his household to run the enterprise, stated the overseas staff had built-in effectively however much more had been wanted: “We simply cannot sell as much as we would if we could employ foreigners more easily.”
Business leaders and analysts have warned that Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s current pivot on migration, although a part of a toughening stance at EU degree, dangers hitting companies that want migrant labour to offset Poland’s ageing workforce.
Poland’s labour market is the tightest since 1990, when the nation began its transition from communism. Its 2.9 per cent unemployment charge is the second lowest within the EU after the Czech Republic, and Warsaw, in line with Eurostat, is the area with the very best employment charge within the bloc.
In response, companies have more and more regarded overseas to fill the hole. The nation now has 1.16mn registered overseas staff — 10 occasions greater than a decade in the past, in line with Poland’s social safety workplace.
However whereas claiming to maintain Poland open to expert overseas staff, Tusk adopted a sequence of measures geared toward defending the nation’s safety and displaying he’s robust on unlawful migration forward of presidential elections subsequent Might.
His authorities reduce the variety of all visas issued within the first half of this yr by 31 per cent in contrast with the identical interval in 2023. Guidelines for scholar visas had been additionally tightened to stop misuse by incomers planning to work reasonably than research.
The Tusk administration additionally continued its predecessor’s coverage of beefing up safety alongside the border with Belarus to cease what Warsaw calls a “hybrid war” waged by Russia when facilitating the journey of Center Jap migrants to cross the frontier into Poland. Tusk in October introduced Poland would droop the precise to asylum for migrants coming by way of Belarus — a step broadly backed by western leaders.
“We see the EU, along with Britain, experimenting with what might work,” overseas minister Radosław Sikorski stated in an interview. “[Controlling] migration is important in Britain, it’s important in Germany, it’s important in the US, so why shouldn’t it be important in Poland?”
Tusk argues that his technique of permitting solely expert staff into the nation can guarantee each financial progress and safety. “To bring in lots of people who are totally unqualified is not the right way,” he advised a convention within the Polish city of Sopot final month.
However the clampdown “could kill one of the most important sectors for Poland”, warned Maciej Wroński, president of Transport and Logistics Poland, which represents the nation’s truck operators — the EU’s largest nationwide fleet.
“The Tusk government has made everything harder, to get new foreigners but also to renew visas for those who already work for us,” he stated.
Two-thirds of Poland’s overseas workforce stems from Ukraine, however Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 considerably modified its demographics, as some males returned to their house nation to affix the warfare effort, whereas ladies and youngsters stayed in Poland. This has created labour shortages notably in male-dominated sectors, akin to transport and development.
The typical age of Polish truckers is 55 and greater than half of Poland’s 300,000 long-haul drivers are non-EU nationals, in line with Wroński. “Young Polish people from Generation Z want to be YouTube influencers, not drivers,” he added.
The restrictions come “just when we are seeing our depopulation and bad demographics clearly for the first time”, stated Andrzej Kubisiak, deputy director of the Polish Financial Institute, a state-funded think-tank.
Poland recorded its sixth consecutive yr of inhabitants decline in 2023, with numbers falling by 133,000, in line with Eurostat. Based mostly on its present demographics, Poland’s labour market will lose 2.1mn staff by 2035, in line with Kubisiak’s institute.
On the Putka manufacturing facility, the swap to a multinational workforce has additionally elevated employees rotation, resulting from their limited-stay visas. Paying specialist employment businesses to rearrange staff’ immigration paperwork and housing signifies that overseas employees are about 10 per cent costlier than Polish staff, the corporate stated.
However staff say they’re glad to be a part of such a world atmosphere. Oleksii Totkal, who fled Ukraine’s jap Donbas area in 2022, stated of his 4 Indian colleagues that he was “learning about their traditions and all sorts of things that I never heard about in Donbas”.
Ukrainians’ eventual return house will intensify labour shortages and require Poland to confess extra staff from internationally, stated Danuta Hübner, a former professor on the Warsaw College of Economics and Poland’s first EU commissioner.
“Maybe our streets will one day look [as diverse as] the streets of London — which is hard to imagine when you look at our politicians and think how happy they would be about this,” she stated. “But I see no other option.”
