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Poles Dream Of Spain – Not For Vacation, But For Jobs

SZCZECIN, Poland (dpa) – Spanish dictionaries and language courses are currently in great demand everywhere in Poland, from the Baltic Sea port city of Szczecin in the north to Karpathian Mountain towns in the south.

This is because even the most rudimentary knowledge of the language would appear to promise a job in the “golden West” of Europe.

German asparagus, Spanish oranges or French wine are items which are not on the shopping lists of many Poles, but rather things which now inspire hope for jobs and money, a dream many people have long since abandoned in their own country.

With three million unemployed, for a rate of 18.1 per cent, in Poland, it was a Polish-Spanish treaty from last year covering contract labourers which has engendered job prospects for a few thousand people, even though the low-wage jobs in the fruit plantations and tourism would only be seasonally limited.

Spain, which 30 years ago itself was the source of “guest workers” looking for jobs in wealthier countries, is now itself increasingly the target of “new migrants” from eastern Europe.

A few weeks ago, Spanish embassy representatives could barely keep things under control when they began handing out application forms at the Szczecin Labour Office.

Women between the ages of 18 and 40, armed with dictionaries and vocabulary lists, sought to convince the diplomats that they would have the necessary language skills by the time the jobs opened up.

Already, some 1,300 harvest workers from the western Polish region of Lubskie have travelled to Spain, a country which they could only dream about ever taking a vacation in. For younger Poles, the jobs are also a kind of adventure, with Spain being much more attractive than the simple asparagus fields in neighbouring Germany.

But many Polish women also have mixed feelings.

“I have two children,” one woman from Gorzow Wielkopolski said, fighting to control her emotions. “It is terrible, having to leave them behind with their grandparents – but there was no other work.”

But highly-qualified skilled workers are also drawn to far-distant jobs.

Many nurses who have taken positions in Norway or can expect a job in the growing sector of care for the elderly in Germany do have prospects in Poland itself. But the low pay in the state Polish health sector drives many to look for better-paid jobs in the West.

With the permission of the Polish Labour Office, there are now several dozen companies involved in finding jobs outside the country – for positions ranging from highly-specialised computer experts to ballerinas to skilled labourers to simple farm workers.

Last year more than 200,000 Poles went abroad to search for a better and more lucrative future. The largest share of these went to their immediate neighbour in the west, Germany.

But this does not add up to a flood of migrants, say such experts as Bohdan Wyznikiewicz, head of the Market Economics Research Institute.

“For many of our unemployed the wages offered abroad are not a sufficient incentive to make the leap into the unknown,” he said. “Many already shy away from even switching to another city.”

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