Why you shouldn’t go to work in Poland at the holidays time
After 4 years, I remembered a Polish Christmas story that I want to share. When a few people decide to do something and have a common goal, they can even believe in their ideas themselves. Of course, it’s good to pursue your goal, but this is how my journey to Poland vol. 2.0, and I don’t know if it’s good or bad. Why do I call it version 2.0? Because I went to Poland after a long, long break.
I wasn’t going to Poland at all, because at first I saw my prospects in Ukraine, but when the standard of living in the country fell catastrophically after 2014, at the end of 2015, out of futility and a strong desire to try something new, I went to Poland, a neighboring EU country to Ukraine, again after a break of 8 years.
The first time I went to Poland I was still a student, I went to earn extra money for the summer, but being a student of the Faculty of Foreign Languages, it was not a problem for me back in 2008 to learn Polish, at least the basics and master a level slightly below average, which has gradually improved and is still improving.
So, back in October 2015, I was going to go to Poland. In fact, I was originally supposed to go back in July 2015, but after finding a job at a Polish labor agency through the olx portal, I never got there because I had 2 weeks before my passport expired, and while I was making a new passport, another candidate was hired to take my place. And then October came. My friend and I were already waiting for our work permits, and in November we applied for visas. My friend convinced another friend of his, and eventually the three of us went. We left for Poland in my friend’s car on December 13, 2015.
Did we have a job?
We were supposed to be hired at a factory, but the start of work was on January 3, 2016. So why, instead of celebrating the New Year with our families, did we go to Poland two weeks before we started work? Having a car, we could easily leave at any time. Now, thinking back on that incident, I can say that perhaps it was the adventure that attracted us the most. We wanted something new, something unknown for each of us. Of the three of us, only I had been to Poland before, so I wanted to check whether I had forgotten the language, and somehow I even felt a certain nostalgia for the Poland I had seen in my carefree student years. I was tired of being stuck in the same routine every day in my small Ukrainian provincial town. The crisis in the country prompted my personal development, and perhaps otherwise I would have continued to draw illusions about my future life in my cozy “swamp”.
Although, to tell the truth, my first meaningful visit to Poland took place at the end of 2017, on December 22, and even then I had certain plans and dreams, and it was purely my own decision, not influenced by anyone. But this is another story that I may tell in the future, and now let’s get back to my Poland 2.0. So, my plans were to change my environment, test my strength, get something new, and of course, make money. My friends had similar plans, and we decided not to wait until January 3.
On the one hand, we were being rushed by a work visa that was opened at the end of November for six months and expired in May. On the other hand, we were already in a “suitcase mood” and really wanted to leave. We didn’t want to wait, so we came up with the following excuse: all Ukrainians from Poland go home for the holidays, Poles also stay with their families for the holidays, so there is a shortage of jobs and we will find some part-time work for two weeks before we start official work at the plant.
I don’t know who gave us this idea and where we got it from, but I do remember that we often repeated it like a mantra to ourselves and our family and friends. Perhaps I found a job on olx, such as a warehouse job or a job for the holidays – for 1-2 weeks. However, I did not take into account two important things: where I could work, knowing Polish, my friends who did not know Polish could not work, and we did not have housing, and no one would offer us a job with housing for 2 weeks or less, not even Ukrainian intermediaries. But we went, at our own risk.
At first, we went to my friend’s friend in Warsaw, where he had to settle some business with him. After leaving Ukraine, we drove and drove, then stood for 14 hours at the border, then entered Poland and drove all the way to Lublin on some regional rural roads. From Lublin, we arrived in Warsaw and after solving all my friend’s issues, we decided to look for a hostel to sleep in. We found it pretty quickly (thanks to my Polish and my friend’s car), in the center of Warsaw’s Old Town. It wasn’t very expensive, but it had 2 rooms and a nice view of the city. This was our first expense – for the hostel. My friend paid everything from his credit card, and then we paid him back after our first paycheck.
We periodically looked at job offers, but since we had a job at a factory in the city of Wałbrzych (the largest city in Lower Silesia after Wrocław), we decided to go to Wrocław for two weeks and look for a part-time job there. Another motivation was that in Wroclaw, and in general in the West and South of Poland, salaries are higher than the national average.
We traveled through Lodz. We arrived there late at night, around 1 am. We walked around the center and did not find any hostels. I called different hostels for a long time and finally we managed to find a hostel on the outskirts of the city of Lodz. The owner was a nice old man. A large room in the basement of the house, several beds, a kitchen, a shower. The conditions were like Sparta in comparison to Warsaw, where we had been before.
We left early in the morning and arrived in Wroclaw the same day. We looked for work everywhere – we even went to a construction site. They asked if there was any work, but there was none. We parked at a gas station, I turned on the Internet from my phone via Wi-Fi Spot and sat down to look through job ads on my laptop. My laptop ran out of power, so we went to the Magnolia Park shopping center nearby and sat down to recharge where there were benches with sockets and Wi-Fi.
I found an ad for a part-time job for several people, physical work, and the city was Wroclaw. I called the employer, whose name was Andrzej. He seemed normal, and we agreed that he would come to Magnolia Park. He came with a Ukrainian woman-his mistress, as it turned out later. At the gas station, he treated us to coffee, we talked a bit and followed him in his car. He was flying like crazy, and we could barely keep up with him on the night highway in an unfamiliar direction.
We arrived in the town of Hlukholazy on the very Polish-Czech border. He took us to a house with three floors, and the third floor was ours – a room under the roof, a corridor, a toilet and a shower stall separately. Instead of a kitchen, there was a table with an electric stove, a few bowls and a pot with a frying pan. He said we would sleep until 10, because we were tired from the road, and then we’ll see. But that’s not what happened.
At 7 a.m. Anzhei came running and started shouting, “Get up! The truck with bricks is here!”. We quickly got dressed and ran to unload God knows how many pallets of bricks. As it turned out later, Anzhei has three cutting machines in the basement of his house, which he uses to cut old bricks into tiles for finishing.
After unloading, we carried the bricks in 5 pieces in a box to the basement. Then we cut them. The cutter is cooled by water, water gets on your clothes, pants, and you get wet. I’m not even saying that the cutter is very dangerous, especially for fingers and hands. After cutting, I had to take out the dirty water, which was mixed with burnt clay and water that got on my pants and shoes. The sound of cutting bricks was so loud that in a few minutes you became half deaf.
But most importantly, Andrzej was mentally unbalanced. He was constantly running around, shouting, saying that it was so, and half an hour later asking why it wasn’t. He called white black, and then black white. It was morally difficult to work with him, and the work was physically demanding. In addition to the three of us, there was a Ukrainian, Micha, and a Pole, Ihor, who lived in the next room. Micha said that the guys before us on this job lasted only a week. There were many who would leave after working for half a day without even collecting their salary.
By the way, we were paid 8 zlotys per hour, and Anzhei deducted 10 zlotys for accommodation per day. Someone will feel sorry for us, or call us bad names, and so on, but we chose this path because we went to Poland to work for the holidays without having agreed to work there beforehand. If someone wants to use this article to show in black and white how hard it is for Ukrainians, I will object, because in mid-February, two months after these inhumane conditions, I was working for a Polish employment agency, developing their website, i.e. doing in Poland what I did as a professional hobby in Ukraine, first for 14 net zlotys per hour, and then for 17. That is, Poland provides conditions for everything, the main thing is to find what you like, and this requires desire and persistent repetition of actions.
In the end, we waited until December 28 and deceived Andrzej, saying that we wanted the payment because we wanted to go to Ukraine for the holidays and return on January 8-9, because we liked his work. Andrzej agreed, paid everything as promised. We thanked him, got in the car and drove away with a light heart and a pure soul, never to return to him again.
We were driving to that still unfamiliar Valbizh with such joy that it is simply impossible to express. We were employed at a car seat factory for 11 zlotys per hour, it was the beginning of 2016. However, since we found the job on January 3, and arrived on December 28, we had to find a place to live. We went to the address of the same hostel that was listed as our place of residence during work. However, we paid 40 zlotys per day for 5 days of accommodation. Plus food, travel, and we broke even, even a small minus, even if we take the money we earned from cutting bricks at Andrzej’s place.
Was it worth it?
As an experience – definitely, yes. After that job, I knew that I could handle other jobs, even relatively hard ones, which seem ridiculous. Even when we meet with the guys somewhere (because now we’re all in different cities), we joke: “You should go to Anzhei’s to work on a brick.” It was a kind of school of life.
In terms of making money, of course not, you shouldn’t go to work in Poland before the holidays. We already know this. So if your goal is to make money, don’t go to Poland at random. There is no need to go to work before the holidays – from December 24 to January 2. The only thing is that if you have arranged a job in advance, then you can only go on the date you are expected to work, even during the holiday period.
Good luck with your job search!
