Posted on 05/01/2011 1:35:33 AM PDT by bruinbirdman
Up to a million Poles may arrive as Germany allows in a flood of workers from its neighbour for the first time.
Like 26 million other hard-working Germans, Stephan Walter feels he has done more than his bit for the cause of European integration.
An electrician aged 23, some five per cent of his €10-an-hour wage already goes on a special "solidarity tax" to fund reunification with Germany's economically backward East. And for the next four years, another chunk will help bankroll his government's generous €89 billion bail-out of Greece, its spendthrift partner on the southern side of the Eurozone.
Now, though, he is bracing himself for another serious drain on his earning power - not, this time, from "Osties" or feckless Greeks, but from industrious, hardworking Poles.
Under European Union rules that come into force on Sunday, May 1, Germany will open its doors fully to jobseekers from Polandand other Eastern European nations for the first time, paving the way for a flood of cut-price carpenters, plumbers and other budget labour of the kind that swept Britain in 2004.
However, with German trade unions predicting that up to a million Poles may arrive in the first year alone, not everyone feels like welcoming the new arrivals from the other side of the River Oder.
"Free movement of labour is all very well," said Mr Walter, who lives in Bielefeld in North Rhine-Westphalia, once the heartland of the coal and steel plants that forged Germany's post-war recovery.
"But there is nothing in this great EU to stop us all being shafted from a tidal wave of under-cutters. We are stoking the fires of social unrest if we just allow anyone in who is able to work.
"I have just gone back to school to get more
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
No, what Germany and the rest of the EU should do is keep out the Poles, and instead allow the unfettered flow of West-hating dirtbags that seek to flip Christianity on its head, and rape or stone every female that refuses to put a bag over her head.
Yeeesss, BUT-The guy has a point about a flood of workers. We have the same problem here with mexican labor undercutting our wages. The free flow of workers idea is a sick joke, besides which, at least the Poles WILL work.
Mexicans and Hondurans and Guatemalans and ...are Catholics. What say you?
So this is something about Germans and Poles? Why is it that I’m suddenly thinking about WWIII?
Historically the Slavs and the Germans have been competing for control of the Northern European Plain since just after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The Germans, with higher levels of civilization and military power, held the plain after they pushed the Celts into Gaul, Spain, and Britain. The Slavs, especially under the Russians, who pushed east against the Turks, and the Poles, who pushed west about to the Elbe, push against their rivals. The Germans, under the Prussians (named after a Baltic people) and the Teutonic Knights, competed with the Poles and the other Western Slavs.
Near the middle of the second millenium Lithuania-Poland was the largest nation in Europe, including the western Ukraine and White Russia, as well as much of the eastern partss of Germany and the northern parts od the Austrian Kingdom. The Germans last pushed east in the first and second World Wars. Now demographics once again is pushing the slavs to the west. Better them than the Caliphate.
I’ll gladly take Poles instead of the sort of immigrants we usually get here.
Poles are very capable workers, intelligent, well educated and in general just plain nice folks!
To be honest....on any given day five years ago....you could have found over 30k Poles in Germany who were illegally there and paid in cash.
About fifteen years ago in the Ramstein area...there was an entire neighborhood built up (upper-class houses), which Germans bought and rented out to American GI’s. The guy who developed this and handled the building of the 60-odd houses got turned into the government by his wife after she discovered he was having an affair. He kept two financial books, and while the original work to put the structure up was done by Germans....all of the plumbing and electrical work (inside work), was done by illegal Poles who stayed for months to accomplish this. The guy got around a dozen years in prison and the government took most of his profits away (something his wife didn’t anticipate in the divorce case).
I’m currently living in Berlin, in the Kreuzberg area (or Kreuzstanbul, as the local wags have dubbed it). Granted, Berlin isn’t all of Germany, not even close. Berlin is it’s own little planet, but the Poles I’ve seen around here are; a)homeless
b)stoned or drunk 99.9995 % of the time
c)petty criminals, with the occasional murder
I’m certainly not saying that ALL Poles are like this, but in my conversations with Polizei, they detest the Poles for the aforementioned reason. Of course, I hope that the Poles that do come here come here for work, and not to panhandle or rob the tourists and the locals.
On a side note, a little observation: many of the Turks (and I know LOTS of Turks, simply owing to where I live, and the Sufi Center I go to) are quite hardworking, putting in long hours at the job daily. Quite a few are small business owners (especially among the 1st generation of “guest workers”), and on balance, I view them as more of a positive in many regards. The Arabs, mostly in the Neukölln district, are also small business owners, though notoriously clannish, and deeply mistrustful of outsiders (ie, non Arabs). The Vietnamese, in the Lichtenberg district, are also business owners, and like the Turks, generally cosmopolitan in their outlook. The Africans, mostly from Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, and Senegal, are 50/50......half are very hardworking folks, with a smattering of the professional class, and sad to say, the other half are petty criminals, mostly involved in the drug trade.
As for today, I’m planning on keeping my head down-it’s May 1st, and frankly, Kreuzberg is typically ground zero for violent riots (on that score, you can blame the local German kids, most of whom are crypto-Communists, Anarchists, or members of Anti-Facist Action, a group I personally detest because in their violent tactics, they’re indistinguishable from the skinhead/facist/neo-Nazi punks they claim to detest). There’s a lot of cops on the street, including the riot police, and I really don’t think they’ll tolerate much nonsense, fortunately. And just looking out my window here, I can see the Turkish-run internet cafe across the street has their beefier personnel working today (some guys that look like Turkish bodybuilders), including one guy I know named Tahir. I’d personally pay big money to see some skinny little vegan Anarchist anti-capitalist weenie punk start something with him. :-)
A woman asks,
“I do not expect loyalty from the people who pay me. They will say: ‘These are the new terms Rita, take them or leave them.’ Why does Germany always seem to look after others instead of taking care of its own?”
Oh but your rulers do take of their own...you just aren’t their “own”, Rita.
If you can look in the mirror AGAIN! you can see whats in store for us when the skells in DC get thier wish with the north American union
this is true, there have always been illegal poles there... As to them flooding the job market, I know my parents who had a condo they were selling a few years back had to have various work done. They were counseled by their neighbors as to who could do the work needed in the apartment, hire a german and get very good work done at a high cost.. or hire a pole on the cheap. It wasn’t that the poles weren’t capable or hard working... they literally didn’t know how to do the work up to the same standards that the germans who had gone through apprenticeships could.
I would rather have Poles rather than Turks, Catholics rather than Islamic peoples. Europe would be better off with Mexicans rather than North Africans.
I lived in Germany, “on the economy,” for six years, and I’ve been going regularly to Poland in the last ten years.
When I first arrived in Germany, I was told by a neighbor, “The vaunted German work ethic is dead. Just try getting something fixed.”
Polish workers, I’ve found, are skilled, hard working, and motivated. The German workers will face some stiff competition.
Looks like a little payback for WWII is in the works.
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