Poland
The Polish Labor Drain
Warsaw, Poland 27 February, 2006 - Poland is losing its workforce. Some call it a brain drain. Some see it more as a way to reduce unemployment. In any case, even with high unemployment and people leaving the country to find work, there are still many jobs unfilled because many people would rather take the government benefits than work.
Currently about 30,000 people per month leave Poland to work in other countries. The huge outflow has many members of the EU worried about opening their labor markets to Polish migrant workers.
Britain, Sweden and Ireland have opened their markets to Polish labor. Those countries seem to have benefited from the influx of everything from nannies to dentists. With Britain and Ireland restricting access to the public dole, there has not been an increase in people from Poland applying.
Most countries in the EU limited access by Polish workers to their labor markets. Countries that did not impose restrictions had a far higher influx than predicted. The British Government predicted only 5,000 to 13,000 Eastern Europeans would come, but 175,000 came in the first year alone. Ireland had 85,000 workers from Eastern Europe in the first year.
The large outflow of Polish workers and young, highly trained new work force entrants may have been a surprise even to people in the Polish government. Even though private public opinion polls taken prior to Poland's EU entry showed a large number of people wanted to go to Western Europe for work, scholars and government experts predicted that that would not be the case.
At the New Szczecin Shipyard workers are disappearing to work in western Europe in very large numbers. Out of a payroll of 5,500 workers, 1,200 left last year - most of them experienced welders, fitters, electricians and other skilled craftsmen who were impossible to replace. As many as five to seven people disappear without warning. Those leaving are the experienced, often with more than 10 years work experience. Workers have been imported from Ukraine to replace them. At the same time jobs go unfulfilled in some areas because people find it better to live on government social support systems than to work. For example, in one Polish city two new shopping centers are having difficulty in filling 500 job positions. The people say that they do not want to work hard for low pay so they will stay on government social support. So jobs in Poland go unfilled as those who want to work go West and those who don't want to work sit home on government social support.
Even though preventing the free movement of labor in the EU may not be good in the long run, Poland may actually be benefiting because as it becomes easier for people to find work in the West, more may leave. And as long as the current government goes down its path of passing populist social programs that discourage work, even with high unemployment in Poland, there may be a labor shortage.
As it stands now, it may be in the best interest of Poland to have countries in the West limit access to their labor markets.
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