In Poland, the gig economy is on the march

Katarzyna Duda is a law and political science graduate from Opole University and author of a book, Kiedyś tu było życie, teraz jest tylko bieda ("Once there was life here, now there is only poverty", 2019), in which she looks at failed socioeconomic transformations in Poland. She also works in the social policy department of the Polish National Trade Union Alliance (Ogólnopolskie Porozumienie Związków Zawodowych, OPZZ). Her book KORPO: Jak się pracuje w zagranicznych korporacjach w Polsce ("KORPO: How is it to work in large foreign companies in Poland?") was published in 2022.

Emilia Konwerska: When I started your book, I thought it would be about something completely different. The “corporate” environment I had in mind was that of Mordor [Warsaw's business district, nicknamed after Tolkien’s creation], with its fine suits and tedious-but-well-paid jobs in the city centre. We're familiar with David Graeber's Bullshit jobs and yet we're discovering a totally different story. You talk about Amazon employees, couriers, and so on. Why focus on them?

Katarzyna Duda: I would divide my interviewees, who work in a company, into two groups. The first are the people I write about in my first book, Kiedyś tu było życie, teraz jest tylko bieda ("Once there was life here, now there is only poverty", not translated). They are generally of advanced age, at least 40, 50 and even 60 and over. They come from small towns and have no job opportunities in their region, let alone a good salary. They earn 3,000 zlotys [around €677, or €67 more than the minimum wage]. These people often travel two hours just to get to work. It just goes to show that there are no other opportunities.

Don't they have a choice?

Of course they have a choice: not to work. The second group are students or recent graduates – people who think that this is just a temporary job. They aim to pay for their studies and gain work experience.

These people occupy junior office positions, for example manning telephone hotlines to help customers with technical problems. They provided information about management and remuneration.

These people think that their destiny is about to change, and that all they have to do is keep slaving away. But that is just an illusion, because in reality they stay much longer, due to loans or other constraints.

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Almost all my friends work at Citibank in Olsztyn. These are people of different ages, with different educational backgrounds: media graduates, lawyers, people with only a secondary education. Sometimes I get the impression that these large companies are the biggest employers in Poland. I wonder how many people work for them.

We don't have that kind of data. But even if we did, it would be inaccurate. Amazon, H&M, and so on – all these companies use temporary employment agencies. The workers are their employees while not being their employees. FedEx, which I talk about in my book, works with couriers: they are not employees, but rather what we call "associates".

So companies have done away with the idea of the employee and all the rights that go with it...

Companies encourage self-employment in order to offload responsibility for working conditions. But they are also doing this to protect themselves from employees organising themselves into trade unions. They use business-to-business contracts, i.e., a transaction between two economic entities. It is the big companies that are behind this trend.

How does this business-to-business relationship between a company and a courier work?

It is not a relationship in which the parties are equal. It is based on the supremacy of the company, which makes the freelancers dependent on each other. The company imposes its conditions and makes any challenges hard.

Employees are forced to become self-employed, each courier being a one-man business. In my book I describe, among other things, the working conditions of couriers employed by an American company based in Poland. In practice, self-employment means that in the event of illness the couriers must organise a replacement themselves, or else they will pay a penalty for being absent from work. Likewise, they have to maintain their own vehicle and pay their own social-security contributions.

In other words, it's a way of offloading the responsibility for an employee.

In another company, in the finance sector, the managers are responsible for recruiting and training the agents. The agents grant loans to customers and then collect interest on a regular basis. Every day, they are responsible for sending reports to their manager on the work they have done. The agents visit several customers a day, sometimes dozens of them, and have to travel significant distances.

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‘The fact that things were better before is probably a vestige of the communist era. There were still certain standards that gave employees the right to rest. These standards were then adapted to the working conditions prevailing in capitalist systems’

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A manager is hired according to the amount of work to be done per task. When an agent resigns (or two of them resign, a manager's nightmare), the responsibility falls to the manager. So, in addition to his or her own work, he or she must also visit the customers for whom the former agent was responsible.

The case of FedEx is interesting. FedEx works with couriers who themselves employ other couriers. The company outsources all responsibility. In the event of sick leave, everything falls on the shoulders of the courier.

All the jobs you describe have one thing in common: they're getting worse. Companies are tightening their belts more and more. For example, it used to be possible to work sitting down in factories, but one day a productivity officer calculated that it was more profitable to work standing up. Amazon employees used to be able to bring their own sandwiches. Today, this is forbidden in the warehouse. And so it goes on. Are working conditions getting worse? Where does this all end?

It can end, as it did at Amazon, with the death of an employee who was simply exploited to his last breath. I'm talking about Dariusz Dziamski, who died in the warehouse in the town of Sadów in September 2021. He was 49 years old. Since 2019, he had held the position of "water spider", where his job was to collect and transport boxes containing products. Among employees, they call this job "the motorway", because the journey is long and the "water spider" is always on the move.

In Dziamski's case, there was a lot of negligence and many different factors that led to his death. Firstly, the labour inspectorate was at fault: of the nine emails sent by his wife, none received a reply, and no action was taken. Secondly, his boss, the lowest manager in the hierarchy, had been transferred from another department because employees had complained about him. Everyone knew there was a problem.

The fact that things were better before is probably a vestige of the communist era. There were still certain standards that gave employees the right to rest. These standards were then adapted to the working conditions prevailing in capitalist systems. At the start of this transformation, in the 1990s, there were still canteens in companies where you could chat with everyone, but that was only a period of transition between communism and capitalism. 15 or 20 years later, canteens were much rarer. Today, things are getting worse because the aim is to do more for less.

What struck me most in your previous book was the case of a security guard who didn't have a toilet and urinated on herself. An anatomical theme also features in your new book: to exercise control over employees' bodies is one of the worst forms of humiliation?

One of the call centres I described has set up a timer to time employees' breaks. Every time you go out, you have to use an identifier that counts the time you've been away. Authorisation must also be sought for a break of more than three minutes. This applies in particular to employees working in online chat rooms. Time spent in the toilet is counted as break time. If the scheduled break time is exceeded, employees risk a disciplinary interview.

In another company, a car manufacturer, one of the employees declared that "the best thing would be for you to come to work having already shat and pissed", and if you ask to go to the toilet too often, you can see by the look on the manager's face that he doesn't like it.

One of the investors in a foreign company said that the "cost of labour in Poland is reasonable". Polish employees earn less than employees in Western Europe.

An employee in Poland discovered that he was earning less than an employee in the West, even though he had a more senior position. Companies think it's normal to pay 3000 dollars in the United States and 3000 zlotys in Poland for the same work. Trade unions are stronger in Western Europe, so employers face a stronger opponent.

Exactly, in the companies you talk about, there's a lot of antagonism between employees, which stems largely from inequality of treatment. Employees are not encouraged to spend time together or to have contact with each other. One of the first rules of the bad employer seems to be "divide and conquer ".

Companies do not want employees to talk to each other. A trade unionist, who was laid off from a car plant, said that companies are afraid of situations where employees are in contact with each other. The idea is that they should not exchange information. Inequalities also stem from the different forms of recruitment. For example, temporary workers at Amazon received a bonus, which did not please permanent employees. But temporary workers can be made redundant at any time, as if they are a reserve workforce. Sometimes employees find out at the bus stop that they no longer have a job. Or managers simply lie to employees, telling them that others have accepted something they haven't really accepted at all.

You devote a whole chapter to the "web scrubbers". I thought that was largely the job of algorithms.

In Poland, there are at least two subsidiaries of a multinational that clean up social media. An employee receives online video content to be moderated, and has to check that there are no scenes of violence, rape, etc. The employees therefore act as a filter. The multinational has subsidiaries all over the world where people from different countries work, including the Polish subsidiary, where there are people from all walks of life and speaking different languages. Their job is to watch scenes of murder and violence, or look for them. You don't know whether you're going to see someone stroking a kitten or killing it.

What can be done about this? To begin with: start remunerating properly the people who watch this kind of horrific content. These videos come from Africa, Asia and South America. On the other hand, in these companies, the best remuneration goes to the people who speak the language of the content they are looking at. Salary differences depend on how difficult it is to find someone who speaks the language in question. For example, Japanese speakers are well paid, as it is difficult to find someone in Poland who understands the language. Polish speakers, on the other hand, are easy to replace.

One change could be to modify remuneration according to the degree of violence of the content viewed. After all, this content has to be checked by a human being: a machine is not one hundred percent reliable on its own.

And employees can't talk to anyone about what they see.

Sometimes they talk about it, and I describe cases like that in my book. Of course, psychological help is necessary and available, but it is not that simple. A psychologist is on hand but employees are afraid to go and see him, because they're afraid of being seen as weak, of not coping, and therefore of being the first on the list to be made redundant. But companies don't hire Danes from Denmark, they look for people in Poland who speak Danish.

You also dedicate one of the chapters in your book to special economic zones. It seems to me that nobody talks about them these days, whereas they used to be a real issue on the left. Yet the history of these zones shows the power of capital over the state.

These zones were created on industrial wastelands to fill the void left by derelict factories. For the authorities, it has always been more important to create jobs than to ensure their quality. What matters is managing the unemployed, so that they can boast of having a low unemployment rate.

And that's how the state gets rid of the problem.

Yes, that's why the state doesn't get too involved. It doesn't want to complicate life for the big companies, because it's afraid that they won't want to set up here. The companies, on the other hand, feel no obligation. They set up here because it's cheap, but if in five or ten years' time they feel safe in Romania or Bulgaria, they'll relocate there.

The repatriation of Fiat's production to Italy caused a scandal, when it should have been a natural thing to do. American companies could give jobs to people in Detroit, but they prefer to employ someone from Katowice to clean up the web. Since big business doesn't care about its own compatriots, why should it feel any connection to foreigners? It's not the Poles or Ukrainians stealing someone's job, it's the big companies stealing people's jobs. We don't talk about it, we use abstract concepts instead: the world economy, globalisation, natural processes, and so on.

But does the state have any power at all?

Yes, but the question remains: does the state want labour inspectors to become enemies of companies? The big corporations are no exception to the rule. In practice the threat of inspection within large companies, including Polish ones, is not a real incentive to implement decent working conditions.

These special economic zones are not there to help employees fight against companies. The state could look into the situation around temporary job agencies, for example. The state could do a lot, but it's not necessarily interested.

I'd like to finish on a positive note. In your book you talk about the possibility of changing work and changing the workplace. You give examples of small changes that employees and unions have managed to achieve.

Sometimes strikes by employees lead to a fairer distribution of company profits and pay rises. As profits increase, so should workers' wages. The distribution should be fairer between employers and white-collar workers.

This is what happened in 2022 at the Solaris group, where employees went on strike and didn't give up for almost six weeks! It's a scandal that a multinational with such a reputation and such huge profits should want to abuse its employees to such a point. But the unity and determination of the employees prevailed, which just goes to show that there is strength in numbers.

Often, it's not big changes, but small things that allow employees to take back a certain amount of power. For example, by regaining control over benefits, employees can decide where the money goes.

At FedEx, severance payments have been negotiated in the event of mass redundancies.

This does not apply to couriers, but only to employees hired directly. And sometimes it's just symbolic things, like starting to write "please" and "thank you" in emails.

👉 Original article on Krytyka Polityczna

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