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That’s the headline in today’s Gazeta Wyborcza. They led with the same story yesterday, the one about British workers demanding jobs for British people. Yesterday’s front page article was surprising in that I was able to read it through without flinging the paper on the floor – and it was written by Jacek Pawlicki. Sure, he didn’t get to the heart of the story: are these foreign workers really undercutting local workers? Are they being paid less than locals doing the same work? Is a collectively bargained pay scale agreement being broken? How much do the workers earn in pounds and pence? But journalists rarely ever have the wherewithal to find out how much people earn when it comes to covering such disputes. It’s much easier to call the working class racist than to do the maths. (Even the Guardian, somewhat closer to the source, seems to have little or nothing about the money.) Also, Pawlicki, despite nearly twenty years of Polish experience with parliamentary democracy, still finds it strange that British workers do not share the views of their rulers:

The protests are all the more curious given that Great Britain has always been a bastion in the EU of the free market and a liberal approach to economics – in 2004 as it was one of the first countries to open its labour market to citizens of the new EU member states.

Still, it could have been worse. Today’s coverage, though, is a little harder to stomach. It’s accompanied by some comment on page 2 from Konrad Niklewicz. He points out the gigantic economic benefits of cheap labour, apparently unaware of the unreasonable desire of Neanderthal trade union types that some of those benefits accrue to workers. Niklewicz, then, openly supports the paying of Polish workers in Britain less than British workers in Britain and yet somehow it is the trade unions that are (see headline) the bigots.

It’s all quite depressing. No doubt some violence will befall emigrant workers, drawing condemnation from absolutely everyone – even God will break His silence – and the employers will laugh all the way to the bank on the moral high ground, as the exploited are again divided against each other.

Janusz Głowacki used to smuggle criticism past the censor by dressing it up as extravagant praise, comparing favourably, for instance, the since-forgotten socialist realist book Głupia sprawa (A Silly Matter) by Dobrowolski with the publication of the first Polish translation of Ulysses. He says he got letters from some readers saying: you know, that Głupia sprawa is okay but still I think Ulysses might be a bit better. How would Głowacki fare (he’s still around) in today’s uncensored world? How would he deal with this from Gazeta Wyborcza, the story of the latest in a line of heroic hospital managers held up for us all to admire:
“Strajkujcie sobie, ile chcecie. Nie uległ strajkom, głodówkom, łzom. Połączył trzy szpitale, zwolnił 40 proc. pracowników. Wygrał wojnę z komornikami. W ciągu czterech lat uratował przed bankructwem wałbrzyską służbę zdrowia.”
“Strike as much as you like. He did not give in to strikes, hunger strikes or tears. He joined three hospitals together and sacked 40% of the staff. He won the war with the bailiffs. In four years he saved the Wałbrzych health services from bankruptcy.”
What a guy, eh? He sacked 40% of the staff. What guts! He closed two hospitals. What balls! He did not give in to hunger strikers. What manliness! I don’t know how a Głowacki would deal with this kind of official discourse. Unless he wrote it himself.

Trade union membership in this country which owes its existence to trade unions is 14% of workers. Nie has a cover story this week about Solidarity’s disgraceful behaviour during the recent miners’ strike. In brief, a profitable mine was joined with a much less profitable one where the miners earned more, having recently received a pay rise. The “new” miners wanted their pay raised to the level of their less profitable colleagues. One Solidarity activist called for the state to intervene to stop the strike. As can be expected, membership of Solidarity in the mine plunged.

Meanwhile in the Catholic University of Lublin we have the extraordinary spectacle of the management – Catholic clergy – being more tolerant of gays than the Solidarity trade union, headed by one Alina Rynio. Solidarity – you might want to read this twice – has called for the striking from the work regulations of a clause calling for tolerance. A clause, which, nota bene, is taken nearly word for word from the law of the land.

Hence 14% union membership.

(For non-Polish readers, the title of Rynio’s books are:
Raising/Rearing the Young in the Teaching of Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński and Intergrated Rearing/Raising in the Thoughts of [inevitably] John Paul II)

Poland’s public health service is still in a jock. Doctors out, nurses out, patients being evacuated—I’ve lost track to be honest. But here comes Agata Nowakowska of Gazeta Wyborcza to take me by the hand and patiently explain that “Raising Health Insurance Contributions Only Puts Out Fires,” (the title of her opinion piece in today’s paper). Her logic runs as follows: since equal access to health services is already a fiction there is no point in investing in public health (i.e. by raising – during an economic boom, mind you – the health insurance contribution paid by taxpayers, whom she cloyingly reduces to “emerytki” and “nauczycielki,” i.e. female pensioners and female teachers).

Sick people go private not because they are naturally capitalist but because the public service is an underfunded shambles. Nowakowska’s is the same circular argument used by Marek Rocki in his attack on publicly funded education: The state should stop funding BLANK because it underfunds BLANK. You can fill in the blank any way you please: orphanages, fire engines, nursing homes…

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 newspaper. On the front page! In a news article! About tax! Tax! Reporting the progress of the taxation law change, later in the article the newspaper writes: “no one voted against it!” Yes: no one! The bill now has to go through the senate and the president: “And they must hurry!” Oh yes, hurry, hurry, hurry so we can get our paws on the money the taxman has been stealing from us all these years and frittering away on sick pay, unemployment benefit, pensions and other such frippery frapperies. “Skladka na ubezpieczenie rentowe” means social insurance, more or less.

The anti welfare state propaganda continues on inside pages. A story on page 33 has the curious headline “Today is the Taxpayer’s Holiday.” It reports the preposterous spin by the Adam Smith Institute that all the income earned before June 16th goes to the state and that from now on you, the worker, are earning for yourself. The Adam Smith Institute is entitled to its own beliefs on how Poland should distribute its income but surely a repsectable newspaper should treat these wild opinions with a little distance, and not write, in sentence one of the tendentiously headlined tale, “Tax freedom day comes earlier than ever this year: June 16th”.

On an entirely unrelated note, doctors, teachers and nurses are on strike in Poland because of low pay.

You would think that with their glorious and recent history of trade unionism the Poles would know a thing or two about striking. Today’s Dziennik carries a story about the doctors’ strike. It seems that the good doctors are manning the picket lines in their public hospitals in the morning and then, in the balmy afternoons, gracefully retiring to their oak-panelled private consultancy chambers where those members of the public who were denied state treatment earlier during the day can now buy it from the “striking” doctors.

The article is accompanied by a picture of Dr. Andrzej Spisak, his hands spread out in wide-eyed wonder that anyone might find this behaviour anything less than ethical. His lab coat bears the name of a limited company…