This summer season, Polish bakery group Putka began providing English lessons to ease communication amongst its swelling worldwide workforce.
Positioned on the western outskirts of Warsaw, the corporate has struggled to draw locals and has turned to staff from international locations as numerous as Senegal, India and Colombia, who now account for half its 500-strong manufacturing workforce.
Chief govt Grzegorz Putka, the fourth era of his household to run the enterprise, stated the international staff had built-in nicely however much more had been wanted: “We simply cannot sell as much as we would if we could employ foreigners more easily.”
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 charge is the second lowest within the EU after the Czech Republic, and Warsaw, in accordance with Eurostat, is the area with the very best employment charge within the bloc.
In response, companies have more and more seemed overseas to fill the hole. The nation now has 1.16mn registered international staff — 10 instances greater than a decade in the past, in accordance with Poland’s social safety workplace.
However whereas claiming to maintain Poland open to expert international staff, Tusk adopted a collection of measures aimed toward defending the nation’s safety and exhibiting he’s powerful on unlawful migration forward of presidential elections subsequent Might.
His authorities minimize 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 slightly 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 fitting to asylum for migrants coming through Belarus — a step broadly backed by western leaders.
“We see the EU, along with Britain, experimenting with what might work,” international 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 development and safety. “To bring in lots of people who are totally unqualified is not the right way,” he informed 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 international workforce stems from Ukraine, however Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 considerably modified its demographics, as some males returned to their dwelling nation to affix the warfare effort, whereas girls and kids stayed in Poland. This has created labour shortages notably in male-dominated sectors, reminiscent of 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 accordance 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 12 months of inhabitants decline in 2023, with numbers falling by 133,000, in accordance with Eurostat. Based mostly on its present demographics, Poland’s labour market will lose 2.1mn staff by 2035, in accordance with Kubisiak’s institute.
On the Putka manufacturing unit, the change to a multinational workforce has additionally elevated workers rotation, because of their limited-stay visas. Paying specialist employment businesses to rearrange staff’ immigration paperwork and housing implies that international workers are about 10 per cent dearer than Polish workers, the corporate stated.
However staff say they’re glad to be a part of such a global setting. Oleksii Totkal, who fled Ukraine’s japanese 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 dwelling 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.”
