The Financial Times devoted an entire article to the Polish labor marketwhich begins with the information that Putka bakeries have started offering English lessons to their employees. All this to improve communication in a company that employs more and more foreigners. Putka has an increasing problem with encouraging Poles to participate workso half of the 500-person team in the company includes, among others: Senegalese, Indians and Colombians.
“Financial Times” cracked the Polish labor market. Tusk is tightening his policy
“FT” cited the example of Putka to draw attention to the opinions of experts and analysts who warned Donald Tusk before the turn on migration. Because although changes are also taking place at the EU level, they may affect Polish companies. Our business needs an inflow of labor from abroad to be able to balance the aging of our society, we read in “FT”.
The newspaper draws attention to unemployment at the level of 2.9%, in the EU it is lower only in the Czech Republic. In Poland, however, the unemployment rate has not been this low since 1990. The market therefore had no choice but to turn to migrants. Currently, 1.16 million foreign workers are registered in Poland. This is as much as ten times more than a decade ago.
The Polish government claims that it is open to specialists from abroad, but at the same time Tusk is against the upcoming ones presidential elections intensifies anti-migration rhetoric. Already, the number of all visas granted in the first half of 2024 has decreased by 31%. compared to the same period a year earlier. Even the rules for granting student visas have become more stringent, notes the Financial Times.
Entrepreneurs need migrants. Poland has a serious demographic problem
Last month, at the EFNI conference in Sopot, the Prime Minister said that bringing a large number of unskilled workers to the country was not the right path. He argued that only specialists in their fields can provide Poland with both economic growth and security. However, the Financial Times recalled the words of Maciej Wroński, president of the Association of Transport and Logistics Employers, who believed that imposing such restrictions could “kill one of the most important sectors in Poland.” Wroński says that Tusk's government has made all procedures more difficult, both those regarding new visas and their renewal, for people who already work in Poland.
The Financial Times also quotes the words of Andrzej Kubisiak, deputy director of the Polish Economic Institute, who, according to him, said that restrictions on the labor market appeared just when we see depopulation and demographic problems in Poland in such an obvious way for the first time. According to Kubisiak, by 2035 the labor market in Poland will shrink by 2.1 million workers.
Kubisiak added that in a conversation with Raphael Minder (author of the article for the “Financial” Times) during the European Forum for New Ideas, he emphasized that Poland had gone through the first phase of depopulation (since 2013) relatively dry, filling the gaps by activating domestic labor resources. as well as the influx of foreigners.
“Both of these strategies, however, are exhausting themselves – only about 1 million of the economically inactive people have the potential for activation, and for 2 years the inflow of Ukrainian citizens to our labor market has almost stopped (the effect of the military mobilization of men of working age and the ban on leaving the country) “IMO, there are no low-hanging fruit on the horizon today in terms of improved labor supply, and demographic trends will only push our economy harder,” he said. wrote Kubisiak on LinkedIn.
The PIE expert added that, therefore, Polish entrepreneurs should use technological solutions: automation, robotization and AI. “Increasing productivity and limiting new demand for labor are mechanisms that can help reduce market tensions,” Kubisiak wrote. Poland has a lot of room for improvement in this matter, because the Polish work model was based on low labor costs for 30 years, and therefore there was a lack of incentives to invest in technology.
As a consequence, Poland remains behind Europe in terms of automation. As Filip Lamański wrote in 2021 in the Economic Observer, robotization in Poland is at a “pathetically low level”. In 2018, we had 42 robots per 10,000 people. industry workers. Regional partners, The czech republic and Hungary, 135 and 84, respectively. Germany, the European leader – 338. The global average is 99 robots per 100 employees.