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 employees from international locations as numerous as Senegal, India and Colombia, who now account for half its 500-strong manufacturing crew.
Chief government Grzegorz Putka, the fourth era of his household to run the enterprise, mentioned the international employees had built-in effectively however much more had been wanted: “We merely can not promote as a lot as we’d if we may 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 charge is the second lowest within the EU after the Czech Republic, and Warsaw, in keeping with Eurostat, is the area with the 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 employees — 10 occasions 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 powerful on unlawful migration forward of presidential elections subsequent Could.
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 pupil visas had been additionally tightened to forestall 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, together with Britain, experimenting with what would possibly work,” international minister Radosław Sikorski mentioned in an interview. “[Controlling] migration is necessary in Britain, it’s necessary in Germany, it’s necessary within the US, so why shouldn’t it’s necessary in Poland?”
Tusk argues that his technique of permitting solely expert employees into the nation can guarantee each financial development and safety. “To usher in a number of people who find themselves completely unqualified just isn’t the precise manner,” he informed a convention within the Polish city of Sopot final month.
However the clampdown “may kill some of the 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 every thing more durable, to get new foreigners but additionally to resume visas for individuals 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 dwelling nation to hitch the struggle 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 keeping with Wroński. “Younger Polish folks from Technology Z need 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”, mentioned 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 keeping with Eurostat. Based mostly 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, attributable to their limited-stay visas. Paying specialist employment businesses to rearrange employees’ immigration paperwork and housing implies that international workers are about 10 per cent costlier than Polish workers, the corporate mentioned.
However employees say they’re glad to be a part of such a world surroundings. Oleksii Totkal, who fled Ukraine’s jap Donbas area in 2022, mentioned of his 4 Indian colleagues that he was “studying about their traditions and all types of issues that I by no means heard about in Donbas”.
Ukrainians’ eventual return dwelling will intensify labour shortages and require Poland to confess extra employees from internationally, mentioned Danuta Hübner, a former professor on the Warsaw Faculty of Economics and Poland’s first EU commissioner.
“Possibly our streets will at some point look [as diverse as] the streets of London — which is tough to think about whenever you take a look at our flesh pressers and assume how blissful they’d be about this,” she mentioned. “However I see no different choice.”
