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Monday 8 September 2008

Problems in Poland

In Poland you can’t get hold of a Polish plumber

Where have all the plumbers gone?

That was last summer. Since then — since they started regular flights from Bydgoszcz to Dublin and Liverpool, since people started offhandedly referring to ‘the million’ Poles living in the British Isles — things have got worse. A piece of landscaping I lazily put off last year costs twice as much this year, because anyone who can handle a shovel is planting roses in the Home Counties. A recent attempt to buy a child’s ice hockey helmet ended in failure because there aren’t enough drivers to drive ice hockey helmets to Warsaw from wherever they are produced. My local bakery now has queues into the street because there aren’t enough salesgirls to serve customers. And pretty much every restaurant I walk past has a sign in the window: We’re Hiring!

We’re Hiring — but so, apparently, are you. You British, that is, and you Irish. And you aren’t even hiding it. ‘Come work in Ireland’ declares a man in a hard hat on a Warsaw billboard. ‘Jobs in Britain’ declares one of the daily newspapers, in a thick, English-language job-seekers supplement sponsored by the Daily Telegraph. A few months ago a Polish weekly featured a smiling construction worker on its cover — sitting on a throne, wearing a crown. Sixty years after the Red Army occupation, 25 years after the Solidarity revolution, the Poles have — thanks to capitalism, open labour markets, EU border policy and British employers — created a society in which the worker is king, and what used to be a $5 manicure now costs $20.

Warsaw’s employers are, of course, fighting back with a variety of strategies, most of which at first involved Ukrainians. In fact, Ukrainian nannies first appeared in Warsaw as long ago as the late Nineties, right about the time that Polish wages began to rise above developing-world levels: suddenly, all those accustomed to paying pennies for childcare — foreigners in particular — started asking their cleaning ladies about their cousins in Lvov.

The result was not always ideal. As a Russian speaker, I was frequently called upon to translate agonising conversations between a diplomatic spouse of my acquaintance who spoke bad English, and her Ukrainian nanny, who spoke bad Russian. Normally, they communicated with one another in even worse Polish, to the confusion of the children, who spoke Dutch. But Polish employers aren’t necessarily better off. Slavs like to claim they all understand one another, really, but the word for ‘shop’ in Polish means ‘tomb’ in Russian, and the same words sometimes mean ‘forget’ and ‘remember’ in Polish and Ukrainian, so you can see where confusion might arise.

More articles from: Anne Applebaum | this section

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