This weekend’s Gazeta Wyborcza is headlined “You Will Earn More.” The euphoria continues, unblemished by debate, assessment, macroeconomic statistics or rationality in the body of the story. “Składka na ubezpieczenie rentowe” will drop from 6.5% of your gross wage to 3.5%. That’s a fall of nearly a half! The exclamation mark was used by the […]
Headline in last week’s Polityka: “How to demand a pay-rise that will give you a good living and not bankrupt your employer.” In the olden days employers were expected to look out for their own interests. Now it seems this burden is also to fall on the employee.
The front page of today’s Gazeta Wyborcza – apart from the strange claim that a 46.7% voter share for the left wing candidate in France’s presidential elections is a “crushing” defeat – re-runs the pensions time bomb scare story. The story is expanded on in the economics section and commented on by Witold Gadomski on […]
It’s always been a matter of some surprise to me that I have never been busted for tax evasion. I’ve worked in a dozen countries under a kaleidoscopically variegated set of tax systems (Poland alone has at least three different kinds of employment contract) – none of which I have ever understood. A snotty letter […]
Pay attention class. Up till now the primary degree in Poland was not a BA but an MA. This takes five years of study and is awarded on submission of an MA thesis. After the MA you can go on to do a PhD – also by research – and then a “habilitacja.” The consequences […]
Nie reveals that one of the creditors of the Academic Clinical Hospital in Wrocław, one of the hospitals facing the bailiffs, is a company called Greenhouse. The big cheese here is one Tomasz Tokarski, a CASE (Socio-economic Analysis Centre) expert. CASE is the organisation that advocates the introduction of additional, voluntary health insurance.
Average Polish pay, 1997: 1,000 zł Average Polish pay, 2005: 2,500 zł Mimimum wage: currently about 935 zł (Some organisations define poverty as an income of less than half the national average.)
You must understand that both you and your children will have to work harder. Who could have have said such a thing to the Poles in these days of economic growth (around 5 or 6% I believe)? Who would threaten a free people so blatantly? Was it a lesser-known Dickens character? A Dark Satanic Miller? […]
This week’s Nie tells of the predicament of an Armenian small trader in Poland. In brief, he has been refused permission to continue residing in the country because, well yes, he is paying his own way, and yes, he is employing a few Polish people and no he’s no burden on society and he’s not […]
“Ulotki i reklamy prosz? wrzuca? do skrzynki” say the signs outside the doors of the flats on the leafy X. estate in Gda?sk. This means “please place advertisements and flyers in the box” but the receptacle into which the obliging postmen have placed the advertisements and flyers looks an awful lot like a wastepaper basket. […]
