This summer time, 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 numerous as Senegal, India and Colombia, who now account for half its 500-strong manufacturing workforce.
Chief govt Grzegorz Putka, the fourth technology of his household to run the enterprise, mentioned the international staff had built-in properly 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 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 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 staff — 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 staff, Tusk adopted a collection 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 lower 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 stop misuse by incomers planning to work slightly 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 Japanese 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, along with Britain, experimenting with what might work,” international minister Radosław Sikorski mentioned 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 instructed 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 mentioned.
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 residence nation to hitch the conflict effort, whereas girls and kids stayed in Poland. This has created labour shortages significantly in male-dominated sectors, reminiscent of transport and development.
The common 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. “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”, mentioned 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. Based mostly on its present demographics, Poland’s labour market will lose 2.1mn staff by 2035, in keeping with Kubisiak’s institute.
On the Putka manufacturing unit, the swap to a multinational workforce has additionally elevated employees rotation, attributable to their limited-stay visas. Paying specialist employment companies to rearrange staff’ immigration paperwork and housing implies that international employees are about 10 per cent costlier than Polish workers, the corporate mentioned.
However staff say they’re glad to be a part of such a world atmosphere. Oleksii Totkal, who fled Ukraine’s japanese Donbas area in 2022, mentioned 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 residence will intensify labour shortages and require Poland to confess extra staff from internationally, mentioned 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 mentioned. “But I see no other option.”
