Admin reforms bring bigger burdens for foreign employees
Getting permission for foreigners to work legally in Poland has become a cumbersome process since administrative reforms shifted responsibility for issuing work permits to powiats (regional offices). Before foreigners receive a final decision on their work permit application, they first have to hand over a large number of required documents.
"The whole procedure takes a long time," said Edyta Holc, a specialist in foreigner work permits at TGC HR Advisors. "Last year it took nearly one month, and now it's two to three months."
Foreigner work permits had been the domain of the Voivodship Labor Office until the beginning of this year, when responsibility shifted to the Powiat Labor Office (PUP). At the Warsaw PUP, the deputy starosta (deputy director) makes the decision on whether a foreigner has the right to work in Poland and the starosta (director) gives the final approval by adding his signature. In the first three months of this year, PUP issued about 1,000 work permits to foreigners in Warsaw. The Mazowieckie Voivodship Work Office in Warsaw issued more than 9,000 work permits to foreigners in all of 1999.
Documents required to get a work permit have to be filed with PUP. Next they go to the Starosta Work Office (Starostwo Powiatu Warszawskiego), which informs PUP of its decision.
"It takes so much time because the documents circulate between these two offices," Holc said. "Generally it should be faster."
She also said that Warsaw's PUP demands more documents than any other powiat in all of Poland. "It's a workshop (where everything is being done manually) with piles of documents," she said.
And that's why it takes ages to get an answer from PUP. Lin Gouxia, the president of Cesarski Palac, a Chinese restaurant on plac Teatralny, faces serious problems concerning his Chinese cooks. "One of them, the chef, got a work permit but another, a regular cook, didn't," Lin said. He sent a protest letter to the starosta but received no response.
After all, PUP has a lot of work to do. It investigates the legal status of the company hiring a foreigner and all of its financial details. The foreigner's qualifications and job description in the company that wants to employ him are also checked.
"It is an exaggeration to a large extent," said Ewa Ostrowska, who runs her own company that deals with handling work permits for foreigners.
"If there are a couple of employees from the same company, to handle their work permits I have to duplicate the same large amount of documents regarding the firm." This happens because PUP doesn't have any archives in which to store documents and run a registry.
Ostrowska may consider the volume of documents required an exaggeration, but work offices consider it normal. Ryszard Tyborowski, the head of PUP in Warsaw, said all entities that want to employ foreigners have to be strictly checked. "Let's say that such an entity doesn't pay taxes or make contributions to the Social Insurance Office (ZUS) and wants to employ people from abroad," Tyborowski said. "Is that right? After all, we have to lower the scale of unemployment in Warsaw and in the whole country."
Protection of the labor market is the office's duty, but in Ostrowska's opinion, the bureaucracy in work offices is daunting.
"When I handle a work permit extension for my client, I have to collect all the documents on him from the same beginning, although I filed them when I was dealing with the (initial) work permit," said. Ostrowska also said that it is difficult to determine what stage the process is at. Applicants go to PUP and stand in a long line only to find out that, for example, their documents are now being considered by the starosta.
This overwhelming bureaucracy can be painful. In addition to Cesarski Palac, Lin runs another Chinese restaurant, Hong Kong House, on plac Narutowicza. He wrote an application to extend his Hong Kong cook's work permit in February, and finally in mid-May received an invitation to meet the starosta. But his problems didn't end there. The starosta demanded additional documents. "After three weeks of collecting a variety of documents, the office finally accepted them," Lin said. And the decision on his cook will be made within a month. "They change their requirements often," Lin said. "I can't stand it."
While the starosta puts his signature on a permit, his deputy considers the particular cases.
"The deputy starosta has a long list of criteria before he makes a decision," Tyborowski said. "Issuing a permit or refusing it is the result of considering a long list of criteria and not just his goodwill."
The deputy starosta is also the only person who makes such a decision for the entire Warsaw powiat.
"He is the only one to decide on the work permits," Ostrowska said. "He doesn't want to qualify any other person to do what he does and it shouldn't be like that."
But PUP says all this is being done to protect the Polish labor market. And it happens that work permit requests are sometimes rejected.
An owner of one of four Indian restaurants in Warsaw, who would not give his name or the name of his restaurant, is in real trouble. His two Indian cooks' applications for works permits were simply rejected, he said. "I don't know what to do now," he said. In his opinion, running an Indian restaurant without Indian cooks doesn't make any sense. "If my cooks don't get work permits I'll have to close my restaurant down," he said.
"I agree that for instance the chef in a Vietnamese restaurant has to be Vietnamese, but employees dependent on him don't have to be," Tyborowski said. "PUP is not allowed to distribute work permits without any consideration; we have to protect our labor market."
PUP may have theoretical reasons for its actions, but for the owner of the Indian restaurant, the office's decision is a very practical matter of survival. Next month he has an appointment with the deputy starosta. The restaurant owner hopes the decision will be positive. "Cooking is not that simple, " he said. "It's in the blood."
Lin also thinks that a cook has to be the native of the country whose cuisine he practices. The dependence is obvious. "A Polish cook won't be able to prepare ethnic Chinese food, the same as I won't be able to make an original Polish meal."
