Immigrants are necessary but will not cure the Polish labour market. The rescue is somewhere else

Only robotisation and digitisation can save the Polish economy in a situation of escalating demographic problems. Relying on immigrants for development is not a sufficient solution.

• The year 2024 may turn out to be the time when it will be necessary to fight tough for employees.
• Immigrants will not fill the labour gap in the Polish economy if the conditions for their admission to our country do not change.
• Even if this condition is met, these will be temporary solutions.

This is bad news for businesses – 2024 could turn out to be the year of vacancies in the economy. While the labour market is very stable, with employment levels above 80 per cent of people of working age, the conditions for improving the supply of human resources are not there, because as a population, we are ageing and more and more people are retiring. 

The immigrants who are already in Poland need to be taken care of because new ones are not arriving.

The number of immigrants we have admitted from across our eastern border is no longer increasing either.

“In 2023, fewer workers came to Poland from Ukraine than from Belarus. We have such a situation that the number of Ukrainians represented in the Social Insurance Institution [ZUS] has increased by less than 2 per cent year-on-year, whereas previously it was several or more than a dozen per cent each year. Of the 17 million people who work in Poland, we have 1.1 million foreigners, and the pool of reserves, i.e. unemployed and economically inactive people who may potentially be employed, amounted to 1.4 million people at the end of Q3 2023”,  calculates Andrzej Kubisiak, deputy director of the Polish Economic Institute.

At the same time, he points out that over the past four years, the number of people on reserve has decreased by 1 million.

“The human capital on which we have built economic growth is shrinking for demographic reasons. We need to redefine the economic model in Poland, knowing the problems we have with the labour market”, he concludes.

He also calls for investment in robotisation and automation as this is the only way to solve the shortage of human resources.

Immigrants are needed by the economy. Such is the demography

This does not mean that Poland should give up on filling staff shortages by accepting immigrants. The fact that the influx of immigrants caused by the war in Ukraine and the dictatorship in Belarus is coming to an end should mobilise us to seek immigrants from these countries. Because whether we want it or not, Poland is competing with the whole world for refugees from Ukraine.

“The Germans invest a lot of money to attract them – they finance their housing, their social benefits. Canada attracts 500,000 immigrants every year, but Ukrainians do not want to go there”, argues CEO of EWL Andrzej Korkus.

We are fortunate that immigrants from Ukraine and Belarus are culturally close to us, but we have to fight for them. Create good living and working conditions for them. This approach may create some tensions, but it is in our interest to be the country of first choice for them.

Immigrants from Ukraine and Belarus will be fewer and fewer, so we must also prepare for immigration from other directions. Create an efficient system for their recruitment and admission to work. And make it clear which kind of immigrants we want.

“If we are serious about sustaining our economic development, we are faced with sorting out access to the labour market for people who are not from neighbouring countries and creating a system for their integration. Because we want to fight for the best, not those who have no choice but to come to us”, emphasises Andrzej Korkus. 

The need for such mechanisms is also pointed out by Cezary Mączka, Group Chief People & Culture Officer at Wielton, the world’s third largest trailer manufacturer.

In his opinion, what entrepreneurs lack when it comes to immigrants is first and foremost state support for their integration, so that they do not form ghettos like in France or Germany, as this results in social problems.

On the other hand, when it comes to the business itself, state aid would be desirable in:

• attracting those workers that businesses really need;
• creating a validation of the competences of immigrants, as it is currently very deficient;
• acquiring professional qualifications by immigrants and assisting in the integration of these workers.

Cezary Mączka also emphasises that Wielton’s experience shows that emigration will lose its importance as the people needed to perform basic activities will become fewer and fewer. This will be the case at the company’s new plant in Bełchatów, where chassis for refrigerated trucks will be 100 per cent welded by robots. So robotisation and digitalisation are the way forward for staffing problems.

Government’s immigration strategy is due next year, but there are still many uncertainties

The government is currently working on a solution to the problems outlined above. It is developing a migration strategy for 2025-2030, which aims to prepare basic legislation to enable the work of institutions and entities implementing migration policies. The strategy is to be developed within 1.5 years and the key to it is to re-regulate migration in the law.

“The law is from 2012. If anyone remembers, we had about 100,000 migrants then. Now we have 2 million of them. We need to plan this strategy with a vision of Poland as a migration state. Because the fundamental mistake that France, Germany or Sweden made was that they did not want to admit it for years”, says Maciej Duszczyk, Deputy Minister of the Interior and Administration and member of the Scientific Council of the Centre for Migration Research at the University of Warsaw.

He stresses that we need to do this because if we oversleep it, we will suffer the consequences. Immigrants cannot be isolated in closed settlements, as has been done with workers from India, because this is a 19th century action. We also need to think about them not only in the first generation, but also in the second and subsequent generations. About those immigrants who will be born in our country. Because their situation will be completely different from that of their parents and they will certainly not leave Poland.

Deputy Minister Duszczyk also emphasises that in order to define an immigration strategy, not only a good system for monitoring labour market demand is needed, but above all a clearly defined national economic policy that overrides immigration policies. Because if the economic policy is based on simple processing, where cheap workers are needed, we will want to compete with India, Georgia or Ukraine, we will have to attract more and more of them. On the other hand, if it is high-tech production, we will need far fewer of them, but they will need to be highly qualified and we will be competing for them with developed countries.

The problem is that this economic policy has not been defined either.

“If someone tells me what this economic policy of ours is, then I will say what the immigration policy should be”, he stated.

He added that the strategy is not about determining how many employees to attract, but rather having good analytical tools to know what the labour market demand is. At the same time he stressed that without immigrants, the Polish economy can no longer function. Therefore, one of the current tasks of the government is to fight stereotypes about them and, above all, to humanise them, as immigrants have been effectively dehumanised over the past years. The immigration strategy is to be based on the comprehensive integration of immigrants while preserving the security considerations of the state so as not to destabilise it. However, according to Deputy Minister Duszczyk, saying that immigrants will solve the demographic problem is a dead end.

Discrimination and stereotypes do not overcome problems with employees
So the issue of immigrants remains open, and in particular under what conditions, in what numbers we will accept them. Certainly, their admission will not solve the problems of worker supply in the labour market either.

It is therefore necessary to mobilise indigenous reserves, which, it turns out, we really do have a lot of. It is first and foremost the employment of women, who are still losing out to men in most businesses and professions, being discriminated against. This is a genuine opening up of business to the people over 50. Indeed, it is very common for these people not to be employed at all, to be employed on rubbish contracts and below their competence.

These are also people with disabilities, for whom there are virtually no job offers unless they are supported by some government or EU programme to activate this group of workers. Finally, it is flexible working arrangements, part-time employment which will allow a significant proportion of the people mentioned here to do this work.

What can be done without seeking external support was discussed at the EEC Trends conference on 8 February in Warsaw, during the panel “HR, labour market, diversity”. In addition to those already mentioned in this text, the discussion was also attended by:

Joanna Burnos, Founder of LEADERIS Institute, Member of the Advisory Board of The Alliance of Her, Co-creator and host of the podcast “Women’s Department”; Dorota N. Haller, Client Solutions Director, Ringier Axel Springer Polska; Tina Sobocińska, Founder & HR Strategic Advisor, HR4future, who focused mainly on the problems of discrimination in the labour market and how to deal with stereotypes not only in the context of staff shortages.