“Young people know that the promise of American Dream has stopped working and do not want to work as hard as their parents,” says Aleksandr Karasińska Olga Legosz, HR expert and labour marketplace expert
Aleksandra Karasińska: Poles have specified conviction that we are a nation with a large work ethos, that we work very hard, we even have a mocking word "culture of the fuck" which describes this attitude of Poles to work. That's up to date?
Olga Legosz: Looking at how many hours we are working (40.4 hours a week), we actually work more than the EU average, so this is not just our subjective impression. But at first I want to point out that present we are in specified a situation in Poland, that it is very hard to usage the terms “labour market”, “employee market” or “employer market”. due to the fact that as is polarization at political level, so is labour marketplace level. On the 1 hand, we have abroad investments and employers who invest in Poland due to highly skilled, industrious, available staff. These employers, usually corporate, fall into Google's proverbial standards, where the management function is to take care of the worker so that he has everything, including free matchbook and dried mango. On the another hand, our labour marketplace is inactive creating tiny entrepreneurs, where the boss has 1 goal: maximizing profit, and so all profit on the worker is its profit. Jacek Santorski erstwhile called it farm culture.
So there are truly 2 labour markets?
Yes, that is why any discussion about the labour marketplace rapidly fires off different people and creates unhealthy emotions. due to the fact that erstwhile we talk about those who are among the privileged, wanted professions, we tell a very different communicative than erstwhile we talk about those tiny businesses which the owner, commonly referred to as Mr Januszex, and he believes that his goal is to maximize profit, and the easiest profit is to maximize by cutting the cost of employment.
But after 30 years of transformation, does the reasoning of Poles about work change, especially in younger generations?
The attitude to work is changing, due to the fact that work itself simply ceases to be this overarching goal, which is present "if you do not work, you no longer sin." due to the fact that they enter the marketplace of generations that see value in remainder and laziness – in the affirmative word of this sense – in the sense of something that serves creativity, affects our future efficiency and development. This is simply a giant change in relation to those older generations who simply assumed that we had to screw up, screw up, and that is the only sensible way to make a career, this attitude of life was on the prop. This change is applied to these 2 labour markets: on the 1 hand, we have those large employers who realize the concept work-life balance and increasingly, in order to accomplish advanced efficiency of workers, they facilitate hybrid work, give them the chance to take a year off, let them come to work with the dog or organize yoga and tai-chi classes in the plant. specified an employer knows that if he organises his work well and people in good conditions make it, their worker will have a good life and will not want to leave you. In this way, they build a competitive advantage and there are sectors that realize it.
There are besides industries specified as developing technology. There is simply a situation that resembles a gold fever – there is just a race for inventions, patents, for a place on the market. And it's hard to anticipate them to. work-life balance. This part of the marketplace understands that since it is incapable to offer part-time, flexible or free Friday work, it must invest so that in the workplace there is simply a man who sharpens skis in winter, in summertime cycling service, which is all that usually takes us time. In addition, these employers pay very well for specified intensive work and thanks to this culture you are able to buy quite a few services: for example, you have a individual to clean at home, order food from a restaurant, drive a taxi, etc.
It's beautiful far from how our parents worked, a generation of boomers who finished at 4:00 p.m. They started their lives.
Such a model of intensive work that connects with life (Work-life-blend) besides enters into a major collision with younger generations who do not want to spend their full lives on work. Poland has created a liberal imagination in the past 30 years, and I am talking about it “classical libek passing through the lake with a backpack to go to school”, I was on it myself once, just going to that school across the river. We had this narration at home that if you're very good at studying, you're going to postgraduate very well, and you're going to work hard, you're going to have a career in a short time, you're going to get promoted and you're going to make quite a few money. This has been actual for a long time, due to the fact that we have replaced earlier generations on the market, which did not have competence in the commercial, capitalist market.
But this American Dream, this promise of promotion, is no longer fulfilled...
Yes, today, even if you do all this, the probability of you getting a fast promotion is very small, due to the fact that there are inactive those people on the marketplace who took this place 20 years ago. These people have been in management positions for 20 years and they don't want to quit due to the fact that they inactive have 10 or 15 years to retire. So this proverbial young man doesn't have a real chance at this fishing rod. She disappeared from the marketplace and is simply a communicative that happens very seldom at the minute and that makes young people say "I don't play a game where you can't win."
The labour marketplace is besides changing globally: we have the automation of production, the digitisation of all services, the scale and pace of change are huge. We see it in all vicinity store, in all Biedra on the corner, where we do the work of a cashier ourselves. but the automatic cash registry is utilized by younger people, and the pensioners are in line for 1 cashier. See the level of digital skills of Poles. According to Eurostat, only 4 out of 10 people declare that they have basic digital competences.
And we're talking about truly basic things, like moving a file from a computer to a flash drive or looking for something in a search engine. More than half of Polish residents have very mediocre digital skills or do not have them at all. We know that there is simply a government programme moving for over 600 million digital training available. The Ministry of Digitization wants to rise the level of these modern competences from the current 40 to 80 percent in a fewer years. So that people can usage e-services, digital administration. And that's good, but I think there's 1 more component missing. due to the fact that erstwhile we go down the way to fill the gaps of competence, technology, we should besides take a very large step forward and not teach people to the professions that will be replaced in the coming years. We should focus all this energy on redirecting people to the future labour market, due to the fact that we are constantly completing the competence gap, and there are inactive any courses funded by the European Union, "you will become a programmer", but present there is no point at this basic level, due to the fact that this part of programming is just perfectly fulfilling the AI.
What about school? A friend of mine keeps telling her teenage son, "If you don't learn, you'll be working at the register."
I am afraid that we talk small about education in the context of the labour market. We do not wonder what professions will just disappear, and present it takes quite a few courage, including political courage, to say where they will disappear, how they will be reduced, erstwhile these professions will be replaced completely or in a crucial part. We besides have a problem determining who is liable for the improvement of people at work. The employees believe that their improvement is the work of the employer and if he did not offer me training, it is difficult, I did not develop. Companies, employers believe that the worker is liable for development, and they have the right to employment competent persons. The state does not offer anything peculiarly unless you are unemployed, but these trainings are alternatively low quality.
I will give an example: we have a rapidly ageing society, so the increasing request for the profession of, for example, an assistant of an aged individual or a individual with disabilities. We are 1 of the fastest ageing societies in Europe (now there are 38 million Poles, in 2060 there will be 30.4 in the optimistic scenario).This kind of profession will gotta enter the labour market, due to the fact that we're just going to have more and more of these people and individual will gotta take care of them, and on the another hand, how do you start looking for who's prepared for this kind of work, whether there are specified courses, whether there are courses at the level outplacement – this is simply a gap. We have a bill that says that with group dismissals the employer must offer outplacementbut it is written in specified a way that it can be any thing: e.g. learning to compose a CV.
You're talking about caring for the elderly, which reminds me that during the campaign, 1 of the candidates – Sławomir Mentzen, called for the privatization of wellness services and the creation of competitive sickness funds. But the main problem with our healthcare strategy is that we don't have doctors or nurses.
True, we do not have doctors or nurses, which is peculiarly evident after the average age of a caregiver who is over 54 years old (up to 34% of nurses are over 61 years old). The second thing is that the same privatisation will not do anything, due to the fact that it will only introduce competitiveness, but not the competitiveness of the service, due to the fact that there is inactive a tiny supply of doctors, we will only increase their choice of work, and in all labour market, erstwhile the number of offers increases, you increase wages.
How did your attitude to work change? You started out in corporate, too, and present you're an entrepreneur.
Recently, in social media individual posted a post asking: “How do you manage to organize reading of all emails due to the fact that so many of these emails come?” I'm kidding that erstwhile the State Labour Inspectorate checks which occupation is correct and which is simply a hidden employment contract, they should check the mailboxes. If individual reads all the emails, they're not an entrepreneur. This anecdote is simply a communicative to me that for me, being an entrepreneur is simply a substance of choice. I very consciously do not want to work on the stage, in the labour marketplace shaped by the current Labour Code. The way you organize work, about 40 hours on average, 8 hours a day, makes you gotta live in a peculiar model. And this is simply a very conventional model: go to work in the morning, come back at sixteen or seventeen, 26 days of leave a year. I like to have time in which I can decide: erstwhile I dedicate work to respective hours a day, and then I can have a four-day weekend, or I like to have more vacations and then make up for it with a different formula. Our labour code is created in 1974 (many times amended) and it simply does not correspond to how modernly they live and want to live the people they have expectations. Here come all these, for any people controversial topics, like a four-day work week. I think it can be arranged differently today, that you are efficient, and you are managing time differently. This is my primary choice, which is why I'm not curious in going back to work, even though I don't have any traumatic memories with the corporation.
What about your Instagram job? It's a diversion, a different kind of work?
This is my grocery store. The activity that is not my primary origin of livelihood, although it could – I usage it for gainful purposes, possibly 5-10% of the possibilities. I like contact with observers. Their direct relations, the problems they face are pulling me out of the Warsaw bubble. economical liberalism has its social cost and we must be aware that the electoral cycle checks the labour marketplace all 4 years. It is simply a pity that so fewer employers realize that it is working conditions that make or do not support the government, due to the fact that at the end we go and put crosses at the polling stations, especially considering whether we live well or not all day.
Many politicians in Poland wonder what to do, firstly, to make women have children, but secondly to work. For example, erstwhile finance minister Rostowski called on women to have children, and another politician, Jarosław Kaczyński, replied that Polish women do not give birth due to the fact that they give birth. So this mystery of why the Poles don't want to give birth, someway politicians are going to...
When I ask about the demography, I always stress that we gotta prepare, she will always shrink. In developed countries, birth rates will fall for a simple reason: since having a kid is starting to be a decision, this decision is erstwhile affirmative and erstwhile negative. You can't turn that Vistula around with a stick. This is simply a certain price to pay for the emancipation of women, a price to pay. Of course, the question remains at which point this decline will halt and what you can do to encourage children.
And why doesn't any Poles work, even though they say they want to? The study of the Women's legislature Association published in 2023 shows that there are about 2.3 million Poles of working age (18-59 years) outside the labour market. Is that 2 million a lot? Against the background of women in Europe, the employment rate of Poles is rather low: in 2020 it was 67.9% erstwhile in the European Union it was 71.9%.
We have 2 elements here: the first is that as this government took over, 50% of the municipalities had no nursery, so it is hard to imagine that women who have children up to the age of 3 will go to work as you are in this group, and half the municipalities have no nursery, then individual in the household must be inactive professionally. Remember, men gain more, which makes the parent the most of the time. So if we do not make all individual with a kid entitled to a nursery, that the municipality is required to supply a nursery, then naturally women will be cut out of the labour market. Let us not forget that this is changing now, due to the fact that Aleksandra Gajewska, Vice Minister of Labour, clearly works in this area and the government builds nursery schools and additionally spends money on “Grandmother”, i.e. 1,600 PLN for childcare from the Active Parent Program.
Another thing that we deficiency is looking at, for example, Scandinavian countries, where fertility declines are less, is simply the implementation of a partner education model, in which it is not just the mother's job, but the parents'. Care work is divided into both. In addition, present comes a fresh model of raising children (fashionable word parenting), we learn more and more about the needs of children, we know at which phase and how the brain develops, what activities with the child, how to spend time with them. We decision distant from the Bullerbyn Children model, where children play with each another and walk around the countryside, and we decision on to the model where the parent is an animator and organizer of education and improvement from very early years: from visiting the museum to ceramics classes. So you have parents on the marketplace who think: either I will guarantee that my kid develops well, or I gotta take something distant from this kid if I want to be active professionally. Therefore, this fresh culture of putting this bubble and its needs in the centre of the family, besides supports that 1 individual is inactive professionally. And in a patriarchal society, that individual is simply a woman. Therefore, many occupation offers should be created on the labour marketplace part time, part-time, part-time, due to the fact that it would be much easier after motherly coming to work for 4 or 5 hours. It's crucial not to exclude people, women, from the labour market.
Olga Legosz – (nomadmum81) The HR expert, in addition to her profile on Instagram, is professionally active in restructuring, sometimes working for the union website, and sometimes for companies.
