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One of the biggest impediments to organizing is the “permatemp” phenomenom. In Poland, the amount of people who are forced to either set up their own company to be hired or who work through agencies or intermediary firms is extraodinarily high. Private employees feel entitled to do so because the leading pundits of economic opinion have built a “consensus” that the main cause of unemployment in Poland is the high cost of unemployment, meaning the cost of social benefits.

The labour law includes provisions to discourage permatemps; after two successive fixed term contracts, a third contract with an employee is susposed to become a permanent one. Companies get around this by putting the problem onto third parties, firms which rent out employees to the real employer. Sometimes firms are set up solely for this purpose. The most clever of these firms actually set up new firms on a regular basis and transfer employees if they have a large number contracted as permatemps. Employees may try to eventually prove that they had a employment relationship with the real employer, but few know about this possibility and most are discouraged from trying. Employees who do not have an employment relationship are not covered by the labour law in the same way, they cannot use the help of the State Work Inspectorate and if they sue their employees, they have to make a civil suit and pay for the proceedings themselves. The court system is a disaster in Poland, so civil suits usually take 5-7 years to be resolved.

One firm which uses a lot of permatemps is Hewlett Packard. It has been known for years that the company’s employment policies in Poland are terrible. Recently we heard about one case and decided to act. The case involves a woman who was not protected by the labour law. She was pregnant, had a miscarriage and was fired the day she returned to work. The case was shocking for us also because she was treated very cruelly by her superior, even being called “the cost of the month”. The Unions of Syndicalists issued the following statement:

“Employer Abuse and Structural Discrimination

Recently the Labour Court in Warsaw rule against Katarzyna Góraj-Kozłowska who was fired from her job at Hewlett Packard after having a miscarriage. Góraj-Kozłowska could be fired without notice or reason because she was employed on a temporary contract (umowa na czas określony) and workers in this category do not have the same protection as permanent employees under the labour code.

The politics of the government has tended to see the main method of job creation as strictly related to creating more and more favourable conditions for employers, including affording them more rights to fire workers at will. These policies have tended not only not to lead to new job creation, but also to create different negative side effects; one such effect is structural discrimination against workers not employed on a permanent work agreement (umowa o pracy) directly by the firm they work for.

The incidence of abuse is widespread throughout Poland. Firms of all sizes use temporary agencies and smaller firms to outsource labour. Some of these firms are even specifically set up because the employing company want to shift costs to workers and require them to establish their own firms in order to “be hired”. Often such workers have no factual relation with the firms which nominally employ them; work in the real employer’s office, take direct orders from that firm’s bosses and managers. Very often they do work identical to direct employees for years and years. This has come to be known as “perma-temping”.

The law provides options for such workers to claim they had a work relationship but not everyone is aware of this or willing and able to go through lengthy legal procedures to prove this; such workers are greatly disadvantaged in this respect. It is clear that what should be reserved for genuine instances of temporary work demands is abused due to greed and it is abused all the more because the legal system functions so poorly. Institutions such as PIP could do more to check for employer abuse in these areas.

Problems such as these are inherent in any system which gives lesser degrees of rights to any workers.

It should also be pointed out that the law creates barriers to creating permanent work relations (stosunek pracy) for other catgories of workers such as foreigners from non-EU countries who do not have permanent residency. Although this is a growing segment of the work population and although the government has taken measures to encourage workers from the East to work in Poland, it hasn’t thought much about this problem. Employers are only allowed to conclude contracts with such workers for the length of their work visa which is usually 1-2 years. Thus most of these people will have less protection according to the law since they are temporary workers. Such a person may be hired for many consecutive contracts but still be “temporary”, despite the fact that the conclusion of multiple contracts should be seen as a work relationship.

Workers are afraid to come forward when they are hired in such a way and, if fired, they are discouraged from taking action because of the incredibly slow and cumbersme legal system. All recent governments have claimed to be concerned about workers and work conditions but keep bargaining away workers’ security with their “social partners”, the firms which benefit from the erosions of workers’ rights. The terms “state solidarity” and “social partnership” are misleading; the only weapon for self defense is workers’ solidarity, direct action and autonomous organization from below.”

This woman had contacted our anarcha-feminist friends some months earlier and after this court decision, they started a petition. (Fundacja MaMa was started by these anarcha-feminists) You can send a letter directly to HP, use their webpage (http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/email/hurd/index.html) or just sign on by mailing to Sylwia: sylwia@fundacjamama.pl http://www.neww.org.pl/pl.php/news/news/13.html?&nw=3519&re=3

Dear Mr. Hurd,

We were shocked to learn about the scandalous way HP Poland treated
their employee, Ms. Katarzyna Góraj-Kozłowska. She was fired from
her job on the very day she came back from a sick leave, having lost
her pregnancy. She was informed by her boss, that she had been "the
cost of the quarter", and therefore unwelcome in the company.

We are sorry to inform you, that we shall refrain from purchasing HP
products, both as individuals, and as managers/board members of our
organizations. Furthermore, we shall discourage our colleagues from
fellow organizations from using HP equipment, unless Ms.
Góraj-Kozłowska receives appropriate apology and compensation for
the distress and loss of health - she now suffers from clinical
depression -she experienced as a result of treatment she received
from your supposedly "mother friendly" company.

Yours sincerely,

We are planning a larger campaign against HP’s practices as we know people in this company and they welcome the pressure. We’ve made some information to the workers and we’ll go next week to their local HQ with a picket and information. Then we’d like to spread the action a bit to the shops.

We’d appreciate it is some organizations signed the petition.

We also understand that few people are moved to action by just one case. We know that there are many cases in HP though, so we are gathering information which will show the global pattern to these labour practices. So far we have come across a number of people who had problems and hopefully they would be interested in lending their stories.