A record number of workers from across the eastern border, the majority of whom are Ukrainians, have been registered in Poland
As reported by Polskie Radio, mainly citizens of Ukraine come to work in Poland, whom Polish employers often hire through a simplified procedure, where the employer fills out and submits a document to the Labor Office, informing of their intention to employ a foreigner. Based on such a document, a foreigner can work 6 months a year.
The number of issued work permits also increased – 123,000. This is almost twice as many as a year earlier. Moreover, 83% of the permits were issued to Ukrainians.
The demand for workers has increased in the construction, transport, hotel business, processing and gastronomic sectors. As the newspaper Rzeczpospolita notes, the trend has changed: while in 2010 about 60% of workers from across the eastern border were employed in agriculture, now this figure is only 27%.
In a comment to the publication, Wojciech Mach, executive director of Luxoft Central Europe, notes that in Krakow alone, his company has hired 400 IT specialists from Ukraine. In total, this company employs about 2,000 IT professionals. According to him, the reason for hiring Ukrainians lies in the shortage of Polish specialists, not in the desire to save on salaries, since Ukrainians earn on par with other colleagues.
In turn, Tomasz Dudek, director of the employment agency Otto Polska, says that Ukrainians do not take jobs away from Poles and do not cause a decrease in their earnings. According to him, he is now looking at workers from Belarus and Moldova, but in this case there is a complicated employment procedure and unclear legislation in these countries.