By Adam Kraszewski, partner, attorney at law, Gessel
For over 20 years, Polish politicians of all stripes have been devoting attention to demographics. Even on Poland’s fragmented political scene, there is a broad consensus that in a few more decades the dwindling workforce supporting ever-increasing numbers of retirees will translate into a major challenge. As for the proposed responses, the solutions posited by various political groupings are essentially similar – and essentially ineffective. At the same time, the Polish labour market is undergoing a quiet revolution which nobody seems to acknowledge.
The source of the problem
According to Statistics Poland (GUS) data, the fertility rate in Poland for 2023 was 1.158 births for every woman of childbearing age. In order to keep the population approximately constant, this index ought to exceed 2.1.
Source: Rocznik demograficzny 2024 – GUS https://stat.gov.pl/obszary-tematyczne/roczniki-statystyczne/roczniki-statystyczne/rocznik-demograficzny-2024,3,18.html, p. 520
This is coupled with an unfavourable proportion of births to deaths. According to Statistics Poland, deaths among the Polish population in 2023 outnumbered live births by over 100,000.
Source: Rocznik demograficzny 2024 – GUS https://stat.gov.pl/obszary-tematyczne/roczniki-statystyczne/roczniki-statystyczne/rocznik-demograficzny-2024,3,18.html, p. 520
If these trends continue, the longer term is bound to bring a shortage of labour in the economy as well as imbalances in the national budget, with more pensioners requiring healthcare and drawing benefits for longer periods. Even right now with low unemployment level in Poland amounting to 5%, finding appropriate personnel might be time consuming – it seems that demography slowly is knocking our doors.
Broken magic wand
The approach adopted to these demographic problems by Polish politicians has been dominated by wishful thinking and over-optimistic hopes for a magic bullet. If Poles are deferring parenthood or foregoing it altogether, the thinking goes, there must be some simple solution. Thankfully, the suggestions generally stop short of penalising childless adults (although one of the candidates in the presidential elections scheduled for May 2025 did moot a tax targeting young couples who do not have children), yet they do skew towards ham-fisted legal solutions. This has not been without effect on the labour market.
One of the attempts centred on leave from work. The premise was that, if young women are guaranteed a long time to care for their brood, they will be more willing to have children. In 2005, a young mother was eligible for 16 weeks’ maternity leave to care for her first child, up to 18 weeks for every successive one. In 2006, this maternity leave allotment was stretched out to, respectively, 18 and 20 weeks. In 2009, the ante was upped again, to 20 weeks for each and every birth plus an optional extension by another 6 weeks. In 2013, this latter package was augmented by 26 weeks’ paid parental leave, which could be split between the mother and the father. In the Polish reality (in which fathers, generally, do not leap at the opportunity to stay at home with a baby), a young mother can avail herself of not less than 52 weeks of leave paid for by the state, which she may then follow with 36 months of unpaid child raising leave. While this legislative concern for the well-being of young parents is all well and good, the avowed goal of these various solutions – increasing birth rates – remains elusive. Also, given the disquieting trend of young women being squeezed out of the labour market, legislative provisions were made in 2016 for combining maternity leave with gainful employment.
The next strategy for achieving higher fertility rates was structured around direct social transfers. As of 2016, the Polish state hands out 500 złotys per month for every child until she/he attains maturity. From 2019 onwards, this monthly stipend extends to all children, irrespective of household income. Beginning in 2024, the child benefit was upped to 800 złotys per child. Whatever its other impacts on Polish polity, as widely debated in the public sphere, one thing that the monthly child benefit did not do is increase fertility rates.
So much for magic bullets, then. No further proposals are in the offing.
The silent revolution
To look at official communications, successive Polish cabinets regard immigration with much scepticism; none of the major political groups support opening the labour market to foreign workers. Yet, simultaneously, the past 15 years have witnessed a quiet opening of all and sundry jobs to foreign workers, and successive government cabinets have actually been facilitating this.
On the face of it, a foreign national hoping to take up work in Poland, and likewise their prospective employer, need to jump a number of bureaucratic hurdles. In many cases, securing a work permit is predicated upon the results of a ‘labour market test’, in which it must be proved that it was not possible to recruit an employee with the given skill set from among Polish candidates. Even a few years ago, practice brought examples of job ads posted by Polish public labour offices inviting applications from “basketball players with experience in a renowned American association” or “pilots of trans-Atlantic passenger jets”; a foreigner could be hired only once the dearth of home-grown sports stars or aviators had been duly documented.
These unwieldy default procedures, however, are augmented in practice by no mean number of ‘simplified procedures’ within which immigration and hiring are facilitated and accelerated. First and foremost, there is the official roster of chronically understaffed professions, which ranges far and wide from nurses, programmers, and database architects to masons and house painters. These days, there are even officially designated ‘special professions’ which are eligible for a fast-track procedure; these include athletes, so the hypothetical American college basketball star must no longer sit and wait in case a local equivalent can be found.
Even greater facilitations are now available for immigrants from Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Moldavia and, of course, Ukraine, who are free to work in Poland without a permit. All that the employer must do is formally declare to the local public employment authority that he intends to hire the given foreigner for a period not exceeding 24 months. Juxtaposed with the starting position, this change of Polish immigration laws is nothing less than revolutionary.
The effects have not been long in coming. As at 1 January 2024, the Polish authorities counted not less than 1,876,878 foreigners officially permitted to live in Poland. Somehow, without fanfare, Poland’s demographic problems are being assuaged by immigration.
The above demographic issues on the first sight might be issues of politicians and sociologists but it fact demography strongly affects labour market. Wishing to grow its business each company should consider sources of workforce. Encouraging women raising children to return labour market or using foreign workforce seems to be measures that need to be taken into account and for which application employers should be prepared in the coming years.
