Memes

In Poland there is mostly no choice anyway, unions only exist in state owned workplaces and big private, plus also in the administration. And often it's the solidarność which have way closer ties to boss, local PiS bonzos and priests than to workers. Therefore often the choice is to antagonise the boss for basically nothing and end up even worse just with extra steps or just eat the shit up but retain the job. I think the historical trauma after solidarność also lingers still.

I’m not against foreign labour, but using foreign labour to manipulate and subvert the local labour market is not cool, and again, I’m not blaming Polish people. I mean get the bag, lol.

Sure. We are on both ends of that stick actually. I remember around 2013+ the job market was finally getting a bit better, largely due to lots of people going to west EU for years, and of course local porkys started to grumble loud that they are forced to raise wages and give people some benefits or maybe even employ them on real contracts instead of trash gigs. And when year later, Ukraine had a coup and started to hit their people with yet another round of shock therapy causing massive economic emmigration, voila! Polish govt drastically lowered all formalities and restrictions for them (while at the same time very loudly protesting against few thousands Syrians which EU wanted to place in Poland) which resulted in 2+ million Ukrainians immigrating to Poland with expected result of social dumping.

What’s your take on Tusk and the new government?

Tusk is undobtedly better than Kaczyński, since he's more pragmatic and realistic, but still he's the absolutely old neoliberal vulture, worse, a successful old neoliberal vulture, along with Kaczyński those two are the most veteran politicians on the top of Polish politics (Kaczyński is longer in it but he got significant period of being ousted in the 90's).

This is of course very low bar, and i expect the harsh austerity, but i at least hope they won't try any funny meddling in the Ukraine war.