WARSAW (dpa) – As Poland, the largest of 13 European Union hopefuls, gears up for a heated round of negotiations with Brussels, fears in Germany and Austria over a flood of cheap Eastern European labour appear to be setting the negotiating agenda.
Driven largely by those fears, the E.U. Commission recently proposed a “flexible” seven-year transition period on the employment of citizens from “first wave” entrants in existing E.U. states.The move has drawn a staunchly negative response from Warsaw, with Poland’s chief E.U. entry negotiator Jan Kulakowski rejecting the move outright as “unacceptable. He is sticking firmly to demands for no transition periods on immediate free labour flows following enlargement which may come in 2004.But while officials haggle over the final outcome, both Polish and Western European analysts agree that politicians on both sides of the negotiating table are doing a poor job of countering what they term “irrational fears” over future East-West labour flows.According to the head of the Warsaw-based Konrad Adenauer Foundation, German think-tank figures produced by both Polish and E.U. official sources on projected labour migration flows from East to West are equally unfounded. These range from the Polish government’s modest 300-700,000 over a decade to others from E.U. sources reaching into the tens of millions.“There is no real scientific or academic way of predicting how migration flows will develop after the presumed enlargement date in 2004. What can be said based on the evidence of the last few years is that there has been a steady downward tendency in labour migration from East to West,” says Freudenstein.“But no politician in Germany or Austria would go out and tell the public: ‘your fears are completely unfounded’,” he added.Freudenstein does, however, point out that businesses and employment in specific sectors such as construction and long haul transport in Western Europe could be adversely affected by competition from firms and employees based in Eastern Europe after enlargement.“But this would result from the comparative cost advantage of Eastern businesses in these sectors and be natural in a free-market environment,” he says.Freudenstein also notes that Poland may be well advised not to reject outright “some” length of transition period on labour migration, if only to prevent a brain drain of the country’s “best and brightest leaving for the West.”Jacek Kucharczyk, senior policy analyst at Poland’s leading liberal-oriented Institute for Public Affairs echoes Freudenstein’s doubts regarding Polish workers flooding the West with cheap labour.Despite Poland’s sky-rocketing unemployment rate, which in March reached a five year high just short of 16 per cent – nearly twice the E.U. average – Kucharczyk gives little credence to a recently published poll in Poland’s leading Rzeczpospolita daily indicating 32 per cent of Poland’s nearly 40-million-strong populace would to go West to find work.“I am very sceptical of the majority of the respondents’ willingness and ability to seek jobs abroad. With the current low mobility and language skills of Polish workers, where many are unwilling to leave their villages to work in Warsaw, they would be even less likely to seek and find jobs in Germany or the U.K.,” he observes.He also points out that Poles and other Eastern Europeans seeking legal rather than so-called “grey-sector” employment in the E.U. after enlargement were likely to be “less attractive” employees when employers are required to hire them on the same terms as Western European job-seekers.“I see no validity in fears of a flood of Eastern labour into the West. It is a completely irrational fear and politicians are behaving in an irrational manner translating those fears into policy,” he adds.However, both analysts warn that Poland’s ballooning jobless rate could lower Euro-enthusiasm in Poland, which currently hovers at a borderline 55 per cent.Experts are attributing the rising jobless rate in Poland not only to demographic trends with “Solidarity-era” baby-boomers entering the job market, but also to the painful downsizing and restructuring of Communist-era heavy industry, often in line with European Union entry requirements.“If people in Poland begin to associate unemployment with E.U. accession there will be major problems mustering public support for E.U. membership in the required national referendum prior to accession,” Freudenstein warns.
