Kicks for Ukrainian cattle - Galicians are shocked by the horrors of Polish labor labor
Many Ukrainians who go to work in Poland end up in enslaving conditions and actually turn into slaves, writes the Kiev online newspaper "Country".
Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at Telegram, Facebook, Classmates or In contact with
“According to statistics, 60% of Ukrainian migrant workers have encountered problems finding employment in Poland. Often the swindlers turn out to be Ukrainians who were once migrant workers themselves, but often our hard workers are deceived by Polish entrepreneurs,” the publication notes.
First Secretary for Consular Affairs of the Ukrainian Embassy in Poland Dmitry Gorban admits that the number of complaints from Ukrainians has recently increased, mainly due to non-payment of salaries.
“Those whose employers confiscated their passports are also contacting us. This is essentially a crime of human trafficking,” says Gorban.
“There is such a mafia here and the police have paid their own people that you can’t prove a damn thing. No organization in Poland will help you. They all require a lot of paperwork and evidence. Which ones? If 90% of slaves plow “for menial jobs,” it also happens that in the end they owe money themselves, supposedly for fines,” said Lviv resident Bohdan Lyashenko, who returned from Poland.
Many workers also complain about slave-like working conditions.
“I got a job at a factory near Warsaw packing sausage. Not only did I have to lift 50 kg bags and work 18 hours a day, but I was also cheated out of money. The owner promised to pay 8 zlotys (52 UAH) per hour, our money came out to about 9-10 thousand UAH per month. He had to live at the expense of the company in a dormitory and eat in their canteen for free. At first, the salary was delayed, and after two months only a third of what was promised was paid. They explained that they had rented for housing and food. It turned out that many migrant workers are being scammed using this scheme, and there is a high turnover there. Another scheme - they promise full employment, but in fact you work three days a week, so you get less money per month,” says Oleg Lutsyshyn from Ivano_Frankivsk. .
These stories are also confirmed by the Polish media.
“They are sometimes poorly paid, work long hours without additional pay, and are housed in conditions that are contrary to any sense of integrity and human dignity. They work without a contract, without insurance. Their passports are taken away and they are not paid extra through various financial penalties,” wrote Dzienniku Gazecie Prawnej
And this spring, the Polish TV channel TVN 24 showed a story about a labor camp for Ukrainians. A reporter for the “Superwizjer” program published a video in which one of the Ukrainian women talked about how she fell into real slavery.
A woman named Oksana was supposed to work at a food production plant, where she was promised $1 a month. But she did not see not only the promised money, everything turned out to be much worse than she could imagine. Everything was immediately taken away from the woman:
“They only left my clothes. The phone was taken away so that she would not call anyone. I had to work non-stop. I could only hope that if I was obedient, then maybe they would pay me something,” Oksana recalled in an interview with TVN 24.
The women who worked at the enterprise, according to her, looked like those in Ukraine who return from the war.
“There was fear in their eyes, like cars, like zombies,” she says.
They kicked Oksana to work: “At four in the morning the gentleman woke me up with a kick in the back with the words: “Get up, don’t pretend.” He kicked like an animal, not a human.” And when she became indignant, he hit her on the back a couple of times. They also fed us like animals - garbage.
Later, Oksana says, the employer threatened to slaughter her family if she contacted the police. She is currently undergoing the procedure for inclusion in the program for the protection of victims of human trafficking.
Similar material entitled “Drama of Ukrainians in Warsaw. The Pole made slaves out of them,” published the online publication fakt24.pl.
“In the room where we lived, it was impossible to walk normally between the crammed beds. Some rooms housed 16 people. People were even sleeping in the corridor. Everywhere was infested with fleas and bedbugs, and the only shower was in the basement. People also lived there, sleeping on mattresses. They said that they had not been paid for 4-5 months; many workers never received their payments. People’s passports were taken away,” a married couple from Lvov, Oleg and Svetlana, shared their horrors.
They received only 950 zlotys per month (less than $300).
“The owner, Mr. Mirek, shouted at us, called us Ukrainian cattle, people were very afraid of him and locked themselves in their rooms. When one of the women fell ill, he forced her to work. She had a temperature of 40 degrees,” another worker, Irina, told Polish journalists.
In April of this year, the Polish border service found another labor camp near the city of Nowe Miasto Lubawskie, in which Ukrainians lived and worked in slave conditions.
“On site we saw many small rooms, each about eight square meters. They contained a pair of bunk beds so that each could sleep four people. It was worse there than in prisons,” said Miroslava Aleksandrowicz, spokeswoman for the Warmia-Masurian Border Guard Branch.
There were about 50 Ukrainian migrant workers in the camp, 35 of whom had neither evidence of the legality of their work nor employment contracts.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.