Labor market: Job boom in Poland despite the corona crisis

Low unemployment, hundreds of thousands of vacancies – years of economic growth have created many new jobs in Poland. Corona has changed little about the boom. There is an increasing shortage of skilled workers for this.

The longstanding economic boom in Poland has reversed the situation on the labor market: a country with one of the highest unemployment rates in Europe has become one with one of the lowest: depending on how it is counted, it is three to four percent. The pandemic has done little to change this, even if many people lost their jobs as a result of the lockdown. Most of them found accommodation elsewhere and started their own business – and in June alone there were already 300,000 vacancies, counts Anna Wicha from the Polish Association of Employment Agencies.

“Polish employers are not afraid and look to the future with optimism,” says Wicha. “There is already a lack of hands everywhere; in Poznan, Gdansk, Warsaw, Krakow and Wroclaw there are now twice as many vacancies as in 2019. The big cities are the main drivers of demand.”

Many do not appear in the statistics

The fact that several hundred thousand Poles are still registered as unemployed is often due to a lack of qualifications. Of course, the number of unemployed is not easily comparable: in a country with rather poor unemployment benefits, many do not even register as jobseekers. If you lose your job, you get lost in the family, go abroad, somehow get by – and do not appear in the statistics.

The employment rate, i.e. the number of those who, according to statistics, could and actually do work, is therefore more meaningful. For a long time, Poland had comparatively weak scores here, but has now moved up into the European midfield, meaning that significantly more than two thirds of Poles capable of work are employed.

This should bring a problem closer that experts have long warned against: a shortage of skilled workers that could eventually slow down the boom. In purely demographic terms, Poland is on the way to becoming the structurally oldest nation in Europe because of the mass emigration of especially younger people after joining the EU and low birth rates, as an economist has now warned.

Often little social security

This is currently still covered by hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian guest workers, who usually only have temporary work permits. “To fill the demographic gap, we would need at least 100,000 people to come to our country, annually until 2050,” says Sonia Buchholz from the private business school SGH. “That is politically and socially not feasible. That is why we should at least try to use the potential of the existing economic migrants, of whom more than one in two are deployed well below their capabilities.”

Overall, however, the Polish labor market is a success story today, also with regard to the corona consequences, which were cushioned, among other things, by financial aid for particularly affected companies. But there is one flaw: the younger ones often find themselves in pseudo-self-employed jobs without social security, popularly known as “garbage contracts”. At the same time, Poland is even a sad European top for people up to 34, says Justyna Pokojska, labor market expert at Warsaw University.