This summer season, Polish bakery group Putka began providing English courses 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 employees from international locations as various as Senegal, India and Colombia, who now account for half its 500-strong manufacturing crew.
Chief govt Grzegorz Putka, the fourth technology of his household to run the enterprise, stated the international employees had built-in properly however much more had been wanted: “We merely can not promote as a lot as we’d if we might make use of foreigners extra simply.”
Enterprise leaders and analysts have warned that Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s latest pivot on migration, although a part of a toughening stance at EU stage, 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 fee is the second lowest within the EU after the Czech Republic, and Warsaw, in keeping with Eurostat, is the area with the best employment fee within the bloc.
In response, companies have more and more appeared overseas to fill the hole. The nation now has 1.16mn registered international employees — 10 instances greater than a decade in the past, in keeping with Poland’s social safety workplace.
However whereas claiming to maintain Poland open to expert international employees, Tusk adopted a sequence of measures geared toward defending the nation’s safety and exhibiting 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 12 months by 31 per cent in contrast with the identical interval in 2023. Guidelines for scholar visas had been additionally tightened to forestall misuse by incomers planning to work moderately than examine.
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 correct to asylum for migrants coming through Belarus — a step broadly backed by western leaders.
“We see the EU, together with Britain, experimenting with what may work,” international minister Radosław Sikorski stated in an interview. “[Controlling] migration is necessary in Britain, it’s necessary in Germany, it’s necessary within the US, so why shouldn’t or not it’s necessary in Poland?”
Tusk argues that his technique of permitting solely expert employees into the nation can guarantee each financial progress and safety. “To herald a lot of people who find themselves completely unqualified isn’t the correct means,” he advised a convention within the Polish city of Sopot final month.
However the clampdown “might kill probably the most necessary 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 authorities has made the whole lot more durable, to get new foreigners but additionally to resume visas for individuals who already work for us,” he stated.
Two-thirds of Poland’s international 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 hitch the warfare effort, whereas ladies and youngsters stayed in Poland. This has created labour shortages significantly in male-dominated sectors, resembling transport and building.
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 keeping with Wroński. “Younger Polish folks from Era Z wish to be YouTube influencers, not drivers,” he added.
The restrictions come “simply once we are seeing our depopulation and unhealthy demographics clearly for the primary time”, stated Andrzej Kubisiak, deputy director of the Polish Financial Institute, a state-funded think-tank.
Poland recorded its sixth consecutive 12 months of inhabitants decline in 2023, with numbers falling by 133,000, in keeping with Eurostat. Primarily based on its present demographics, Poland’s labour market will lose 2.1mn employees by 2035, in keeping with Kubisiak’s institute.
On the Putka manufacturing unit, the change to a multinational workforce has additionally elevated workers rotation, on account of their limited-stay visas. Paying specialist employment companies to rearrange employees’ immigration paperwork and housing implies that international workers are about 10 per cent costlier than Polish workers, the corporate stated.
However employees say they’re glad to be a part of such a global atmosphere. Oleksii Totkal, who fled Ukraine’s jap Donbas area in 2022, stated of his 4 Indian colleagues that he was “studying about their traditions and all kinds of issues that I by no means heard about in Donbas”.
Ukrainians’ eventual return house will intensify labour shortages and require Poland to confess extra employees from internationally, stated Danuta Hübner, a former professor on the Warsaw Faculty of Economics and Poland’s first EU commissioner.
“Perhaps our streets will sooner or later look [as diverse as] the streets of London — which is tough to think about whenever you have a look at our flesh pressers and suppose how completely happy they might be about this,” she stated. “However I see no different possibility.”