The struggles Ukranians face in European labor markets range from missing wages and illegally low pay to unlivable housing conditions, psychological violence and a complete disregard for the wellbeing of workers and standards set by employment law.
Eva Malá from the NGO People in Need summarizes the situation like this: “The war stirred up the business of poverty. Companies can make money at the expense of Ukrainians in three ways: charging rent, receiving subsidies for refugees and exploiting them through agency work.”
NGOs engaged in helping affected workers have been reporting rising numbers of Ukrainians seeking help in dealing with abusive labor practices. For example, Faire Integration in Germany, a consultant network that advises foreigners, reportedly received over 1,400 cases of Ukrainians seeking advice in 2023, with work related questions being the overwhelming focus. Similarly, the Czech NGO Foreigner is not a slave registers hundreds of requests for help per year.
The Czech Labor Inspectorate reports that common labor law violations against Ukrainian workers include unpaid or underpaid wages, illegal work, missing time records and incomplete agreements. On social media, Foreigner’s founder Jaroslav Čepa described these practices as the “wage mafia.”.
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[…] A German consultant for exploited workers, Sergey Sabelnikov, [reported]: “At the beginning of the war, some Ukrainian women were picked up directly at the border with Poland and then exploited as cheap labor in hotels. There was great dependence because the women were housed directly by the employer in accommodations. Those who resigned also lost their roof over their heads.”
He adds that despite the problems, these cases have become less frequent. “Now the cases are different: this is probably also because many Ukrainians have become more independent and speak better German. They find other jobs or can defend themselves better,” Sabelnikov says.
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In most EU countries, temp agency work is only legal with a permit from state authorities. To avoid the hassle and oversight of authorities, many temp agencies simply don’t acquire these permits and masquerade as construction or cleaning service providers, while in reality providing workers, not services.
This practice is known as covert labor brokering and allows companies to avoid complying with the laws around the leasing of workers, notably those that demand comparable wages or similar working conditions between regular and leased workers. Our investigators from the Czech Republic and Lithuania have found two striking examples of such scams …
and those are obviously related. If you are say a Ukranin doctor and you do not speak German, you are going to have a hard time communicating with your patients. You are extremely likely to miss something, because they can not tell you what the problem is. Being able to speak German is therefore a necessary part of being qualified for the job.
There are other even more obviously problematic cases. If you are a lawyer, German law is obviously different to Ukranian law and you have to be extremely good in German.
Even if it is not a requirement, being a fluent German speaker is just a massive advantage over a secodn language speaker. Especially since half of Ukranians refugees in Germany claim of themself to be bad in German and a good bit of the rest just claim of their German to be okay. So many will just higher a German, if they can.