Poland / A country of cheap labour ?

Poland is a country of cheap labour rather than of advanced business models – that was the perception of a majority of CEOs of multinational corporations who were asked in a recent survey what Poland had to offer foreign investors.

It’s the Poles themselves who are responsible for earning their image as Europe’s suckers. “We have the highest unemployment rate in the country and the lowest average wage. As a result, we can offer investors extensive resources of cheap labour,” boasts the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship in the official brochure, Investing in Poland 2014. The Hackett Group, a leading international provider of offshoring and cost reduction solutions, agrees: “Labour costs in Poland are still 50 per cent lower than in western Europe and in the US. Such cost advantage places Poland third in the world behind China and India in a ranking of the best outsourcing locations,” the company said in a recent report, a view that is hardly a compliment.

Over 100,000 Poles are employed at business process outsourcing (BPO) centres that offer back-office (human resources, finance, accounting) and front-office (call centre) services to international companies. The business is a Polish specialty, as shown by the recent creation of 600 jobs in Cracow by the US financial services company State Street. The attraction of the Polish BPO sector is that in Poland a junior specialist (with no previous experience) takes home €100 less a month than his or her Hungarian counterpart and €75 less than in the Czech Republic, as shown by an international comparison of salaries in the BPO sector featured in Business Services in Poland 2013, a report by the Association of Business Service Leaders in Poland.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at 

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