Benefit
ban wouldn’t keep Poles out of UK
It’s
the higher salaries, not the benefits, that draw Poles to Britain.
By OLA CICHOWLAS
2/17/16, 6:01 AM CET Updated 2/17/16, 6:20 AM CET
SOKÓŁKA, Poland —
In his campaign to negotiate a new deal for the U.K. in the European
Union,
David Cameron is
taking aim at Tomasz Bancerek’s customers.
That’s because the
U.K. prime minister’s goal of limiting benefits paid to migrants
coming to Britain from other EU countries is in large part directed
at the million or so Poles who have flooded into the U.K. over the 12
years since Poland joined the EU, in the process becoming the largest
community of foreign citizens in Britain.
Those are the people
Bancerek drives in his minibus as he makes his twice-weekly 20-hour,
2,000-kilometer run from Sokółka, a town of 18,000 hard by Poland’s
eastern border with Belarus, to London.
“People prefer the
door-to-door service,” said Bancerek as he loaded his van,
decorated with a British flag and a “Sokółka-London” sign.
And he’s got some
bad news for Cameron. His clients aren’t in the U.K. solely to take
advantage of the country’s social benefits, and they’ve got no
intention of giving up a life that earns them significantly higher
pay than they’d be able to make at home.
“Even if you work
day and night, it’s hard to make a decent living around here,”
said Ewa, traveling to visit her sister, a shop assistant in north
London.
Unemployment in the
region around Sokółka is 15 percent, significantly higher than the
national average of 10.3 percent. The average pre-tax monthly salary
in the region is 3,348 złotys (€760).
That’s only a
fraction of what a worker can make in London. The average salary for
a construction worker in the U.K. is £30,806 a year — that works
out to 14,530 złotys a month, an unimaginable salary for a Polish
worker who stays home in Sokółka.
It
is the difference in wages — not social benefits — that motivates
Poles to go.
That extra pay, plus
better benefits, are among the reasons the birthrate among Polish
women in the U.K. is higher than in Poland — which has one of the
EU’s lowest fertility rates. That’s the case even though Poland’s
cost of living is much lower than the U.K.’s
Marta Kownacka is a
stay-at-home mother in Sokółka. Her husband also owns a transport
business between Poland and the U.K., the family’s main source of
revenue. The couple met in Britain and recently moved back to Poland
to raise their children closer to extended family. Despite the family
ties in Poland, motherhood, she said, remains easier in the U.K.
The sight of divided
families — where one parent is working abroad — is less common in
Poland than when the borders first opened. The (mostly male) migrants
who travel back and forth to provide for their families are nicknamed
“sailors.”
“It’s more
common amongst older people, whose children are over 18,” said
Kownacka.
The draw of higher
salaries keeps pulling Poles into the U.K. — to the frustration of
locals who have to compete against Polish workers.
Migration
frustration
It’s that
irritation that is driving Cameron’s hunt for a way to stem the
labor migration to the U.K. from poorer Central Europe. In
negotiations with European Council President Donald Tusk (a former
Polish prime minister), Cameron has tacit approval for an “emergency
brake” on benefits for new EU migrants.
That still has to
get the nod from the 27 other EU leaders at this week’s summit,
which is why Cameron has been making the rounds of regional leaders
like Poland’s Prime Minister Beata Szydło.
British PM David
Cameron and Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan
Smith at the Action For Employment office in Brixton, London
In meetings with
Szydło and with Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the ruling Law
and Justice party and Poland’s most powerful politician, the Poles
made it clear they won’t countenance any steps that affect the
benefits of EU migrants already in the U.K.
The Polish
government wants to be seen to be protecting the rights of Poles in
Britain — a cause especially important in its heartland of eastern
Poland, where the rural, religious and socially conservative
population has long been a bulwark for Law and Justice.
But the increasingly
friendless government in Warsaw has also said that London will be
Poland’s leading EU ally, and wants help in pushing through the
permanent stationing of NATO troops in the region.
“To
stop them from leaving, you need to offer something and we simply
cannot compete with British wages” — Adam Łajkowski, Sokółka’s
mayoral office
“A lot of
political capital has been invested in the relationship between the
new government and the U.K.,” said Przemysław Biskup, a lecturer
in Polish-British relations at the University of Warsaw.
Away from the high
politics of Law and Justice’s relationship with Britain’s
Conservatives, and Poland’s assessment of the threat posed by
Russia, people on the ground in places like Sokółka still calculate
that it makes sense for them to move. Of course they will happily
take the more generous family benefits they get from the U.K.
“I know Poles who
are eligible for U.K. child benefits, they take them if they know
how,” said Bancerek.
“We are taxpayers!
It’s like questioning if someone should have the right to take out
his pension,” added his co-driver.
But that’s not the
reason so many have left the birch forests and endless horizons of
eastern Poland for the U.K.
It is the difference
in wages — not social benefits — that motivates Poles to go.
“Would I leave my
own family and go to a foreign country to sit at home on benefits?”
asked Andrzej Bujniacki, who is traveling back to the U.K., where he
works as a delivery driver, after a short stay in Sokółka.
And the debate about
benefits in London and in Brussels won’t stop that.
“Barring access to
U.K. benefits will not affect people from leaving here in any way,”
said Adam Łajkowski of Sokółka’s mayoral office. “To stop them
from leaving, you need to offer something and we simply cannot
compete with British wages.”
There’s no
prospect of salaries quadrupling in eastern Poland. So despite the
drumbeat of negative coverage from U.K. tabloids deploring what they
call “benefit tourism,” Bancerek doesn’t foresee a quick end to
the service he provides, even if the atmosphere for Poles in the U.K.
has soured of late.
“When I returned
home from a shift, people would ask me if Brits don’t like Poles,”
said Bancerek, who lived for two years in Luton, a town north of
London.
Authors:
Ola Cichowlas
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