The Polish flexible capitalism: the rise and perpetuation of precarious employment

As discussed earlier (Mrozowicki, Karolak, & Krasowska, 2017, pp. 230-235), Poland underwent at least three waves of precarisation driven - among others - by the macro-social reforms, employer strategies, and collective labour weakness: (1) the first wave in the 1990s mostly connected with the consequences of system change including the restructuring and privatisation of state-owned industry which resulted in massive job losses; (2) the second wave in the late 1990s until the global economic crisis in 2008 characterised by attempts to attract foreign direct investments (FDIs), fight unemployment and adjust the Polish economy and law to the requirements related to the EU accession; (3) the third wave connected to the economic slowdown in Poland in 2008-2010 and the consequences of anti-crisis legislation adopted in 2009.

Looking at Figure 6.1, several remarks can be made on the characteristics of the Polish variety of precarity. Firstly, the share of those with temporary employment contracts has grown systematically since the late 1990s, whereas the share of part-timers stagnated at a low level. The Polish variety of labour market flexibili- sation, likewise in other CEE countries (Eurostat, 2019a), is characterised by low shares of part-time jobs as compared to the EU-28 average (19.1% in 2018 in the EU-28 as compared to 6.4% in Poland). It seems to be connected with low wages in these countries, which makes it very difficult to live without a full-time job, as well as with the prevalence of civil law contracts that offer more advantages to employers than part-time contracts (Maciejewska et al., 2016, p. 248). It also needs to be noted that part-time employment can be an important way of increasing labour utilisation for some groups (e.g. parents, adult learners, workers with disabilities), which does not need to be connected with precarity. This observation

Figure 6.1 Basic characteristics of the Polish labour market

Notes. Labour utilisation is measured as hours worked per capita. The figure presents changes m labour utilisation per year (in %). Unemployment, part-time, and temporary employment statistics are presented for age category 15-64.

Source: Own elaboration based on (Eurostat, 2019a) and (OECD, 2020).

is supported by a decrease of involuntary part-time employment (in age category 15-64) in Poland from 32.3% in 2014 to 15.9% in 2018 (the EU-28 average is 24.8%; Eurostat, 2019a).

Secondly, the employment rate in Poland, following a decline in the period of very high unemployment in the early 2000s, kept on growing. While in 2004 the employment rate was 64.6% for 15- to 64-year-olds in EU-15 and 51.4% in Poland, in 2018 the difference was much lower: 68.7% in EU-15 and 67.4% in Poland. As argued elsewhere, growing employment rates were mostly achieved by replacing permanent jobs with temporary jobs, in particular in the time of high unemployment in 2001-2004 (Maciejewska et al., 2016, p. 247). Falling unemployment rates and growing employment rates can also be related to mass emigration abroad after the European Union enlargement. While in 2002, the number of Poles residing abroad was 786 thousand, it grew to 2.270 thousand in 2007 and in fact still continued to grow despite a short period of decline as result of the global economic crisis in 2009-2010. In 2018, there were 2.445 thousand Poles abroad (GUS, 2019a); the fact which might have also influenced the levels of labour utilisation, understood in quantitative terms as hours worked per capita, which grew in 2002-2007 until the moment of economic slowdown in 2009.

Thirdly, Poland observed a sharp rise in the share of temporary employees in 1999-2007, followed by some decline in the period of economic slowdown in 2007-2009, growth until 2014, and a subsequent slow decline. In the youngest category, temporary employment affects slightly more female workers than male: 66.9% of employed women aged 15-24 are temporarily employed as compared to 59.1% of men. Lower-status employees are more often temporarily employed than other groups: almost 39.2% of lower-status employees worked with contracts of limited duration in 2018 as compared to 8.4% of managers. Low education coexists with lower employment rates in most of the EU countries; in Poland it was 43.1% in 2018 as compared to 88.7% for those with tertiary education (Eurostat, 2019a). Education level also correlates with unemployment rates, with greater rates among those with primary and vocational education (as compared to university graduates; Eurostat, 2020). Taking into account these observations and the high level of temporary employment among lower-status groups, it could be cautiously suggested that temporary employment serves as a tool of labour market activation of lower-skilled workers.

Fourthly, it has to be remembered that the category of temporary employees in the Eurostat statistics covers a variety of work situations of those with fixed-term contracts. In Poland, it includes both workers with temporary employment contracts covered by the Labour Code and those with contracts regulated by the civil law, which concerns contracts of mandate (атома zlecenie) and contracts for a specific task (атома о dzielo). At the present moment, the most precarious forms of contracts are specific task contracts (see Table 6.1).

According to the most recent data, in 2018 there were 1.3 million people who worked solely based on civil law contracts in Poland (8% of the employed aged 15-64); a slight growth as compared to 2017 when the number was 1.25 million. Simultaneously, 1.5 million workers in Poland (9.3% of the employed) earned less than minimum wage in the same year (GUS, 2019b). Taking into account that temporary employment meant approximately 30% lower wages than permanent

Table 6.1 The forms of paid work in Poland and their occurrence

Sources. Own elaboration based on Karolak (2020) and Mrozowicki and Maciejewska (2016).

Notes, a) since 2016; b) solo self-employed except for agriculture; c) in case of dependent self- employed; d) starting from 2019.

employment, it can be suggested that the very high number of civil law and temporary contracts in Poland fosters the development ofprecarity (Kiersztyn, 2012, p. 107).