Poland wants its workers back from Western Europe

Warszawa.Lukasz Gruzla, a university graduate from southwestern Poland, loads planes at Luton Airport outside London. He has no plans to return to his hometown near Wroclaw.

"Come back to what?" Gruzla, 25, asked as he waited for a flight to London after visiting his family in Poland. "The work I have there allows me to live. I can buy a car, pay my bills."

But Gruzla, one of at least 400,000 Poles who have emigrated to Britain since 2004, is just the type of worker that Wroclaw is trying to lure back. While Poland has the highest unemployment rate in the European Union, this statistic masks a growing shortage of skilled workers.

Higher pay and the availability of low-cost airline flights are siphoning off the country's best-educated young people to Western Europe.

Wroclaw, in Lower Silesia, is the fourth-largest city in Poland. It is a hub for technology research that has attracted companies like Hewlett-Packard and Google, and it benefits from road and rail links built when the area was ruled by Germany and Austria. The city, which nearly as close to Berlin as it is to Warsaw, is nonetheless struggling to fill 125,000 jobs created over the past two years.

Poland's booming cities may push the country's economic growth to 6 percent this year, the fastest in a decade, according to the Finance Ministry.

The government sponsored 43 investments by international companies last year. A dozen were in Wroclaw's province, more than in any of the 15 other regions in Poland. Wroclaw has attracted more than €5 billion, or $6.7 billion, of foreign money in the past decade.

Last month, Google that said it would join Siemens of Germany and Credit Suisse in the city. Google plans to create 200 jobs and Credit Suisse expects to hire 400 people in Wroclaw, a city on the Oder River that features a baroque city hall and a 6,000-seat auditorium that is on the United Nation's list of World Heritage sites.

To avoid becoming a victim of its own success, Wroclaw put up billboards in Britain that beseech Polish workers to "Come back! Wroclaw loves you."

"If we manage to maintain bridges with people who have emigrated and they start coming back, then the emigration will be only a good thing," said Tomasz Gondek, who heads the investment support unit at Wroclaw's development agency.

In November, President Lech Kaczynski of Poland acknowledged that his country was having a hard time finding qualified workers to participate in the country's rapid economic development.

"I can only hope that they will eventually return to Poland," he said during a visit to Edinburgh. "If Poland continues to develop at the present pace, then the process of Poles going abroad will phase out."

Of the people who have left for Britain since Poland joined the EU in 2004, about 80 percent are under 35 and a third are college graduates, according to the Labor Ministry.

The exodus helped cut Poland's jobless rate to 14.4 percent in March from almost 20 percent three years ago. In Wroclaw the rate is 8.7 percent, lower than that of Germany.

Ewelina Kazubska, 22, who manages a nightclub in London, says Polish companies cannot match the cash offered by British employers. Salaries in Poland average about 2,780 zloty a month, the equivalent of £504 or close to $1,000, and a little more than the weekly average in Britain.

"My salary is the same number as it was in Wroclaw, except it's in pounds, not zloty," she said at Wroclaw airport, before boarding one of the 54 weekly flights to Britain and Ireland. "In fact, I'm thinking of emigrating further - to the U.S."

Wroclaw created 125,000 new jobs in 2005 and 2006, and the number of new positions is set to increase this year and next, Gondek of the development agency said. The city of 635,000 is the capital of a province with a population of 2.9 million.

Emigration has not stopped Hewlett-Packard from planning to double the size of its Wroclaw operation to 2,000 employees. The center provides administrative services like tax reporting for the company's other offices.

Joanna Kotyrba, in charge of recruitment for the facility, is focusing on finding workers in other parts of Poland.

"There's a lower number of applications now, so the company has to be more engaged," she said.

President Kaczynski said that he wanted workers to come home after they gained experience abroad.

"They'll bring the Anglo-Saxon business culture, money, and contacts in the West," said Gondek, who spent two years in Australia before returning to Poland. "We didn't run the campaign because we wanted 300,000 people to come back the day after we launched it.

In addition to the campaign in London, Wroclaw is renting billboards in Ukraine, and developing versions of its Web site in Ukrainian and Russian, targeted at students.

Gruzla, for his part, is sticking with his decision to leave. He says life in Britain is just easier than in Poland.

"Recently I had to change my Polish national ID card, and there was so much running around just for one piece of paper," he said. "Over there they don't have those kinds of problems."

Source:iht.com