Few at the richer end of Europe would begrudge rising prosperity for
the hundred million Eastern Europeans who joined the EU between 2004 and
2007, 38 million of them in Poland. Whether or not Poland’s rise is an
economic miracle, it’s an economist’s miracle, in the sense that it can,
and has been, used to justify most of the mainstream non-Marxist
economic currents of the past century. Free traders can claim it shows
how opening up a previously closed market has expanded and enriched the
European economy as a whole. Neoliberals can claim that the effects of
Poland’s post-communist economic shock therapy, the mass closures of
state factories and the ruthless privatisation and grievous unemployment
that followed, prepared the way for the free market to come to the
rescue with foreign investment and a resurgence of local enterprise.
Keynesians can point to the vast amounts of public money Western Europe
has poured into Poland to validate their argument that everyone gains
when the state takes the lead in refuelling an economy that has run out
of gas.
None of these economic ideas accommodates the triumph of
Law and Justice, just as they do not accommodate Brexit and Trump. Such
populist phenomena are linked by their backers’ ability to insist on the
centrality of money-in-your-pocket economics to their cause, while at
the same time promoting the primacy of romantic ideas of national and
racial sovereignity in which, by definition, ideals come before money.
The old notion of voters acting out of enlightened self-interest falls
short in explaining this; but there are too many ideas, there is too
much economics, in the rhetoric of the populists to say, as it’s
fashionable to say, that voters are acting ‘emotionally’. The rise of
Law and Justice and the Brexit referendum victory only make sense if
economics and culture are seen as two aspects of a single field, whose
fundamental substance is the collective psyche of voters; a field in
which apparently unconnected economic and cultural abstractions (GDP, a
lost empire) and apparently unconnected economic and cultural
particularities (how much you get paid, the history of the building
where you work) have links and relative weights that economics, and
globalised consumer capitalism, struggle to measure.
Sometimes
globalised consumer capitalism links communities in these two radically
non-conformist EU states, links them, in that strange way of
globalisation, without doing anything to bring them together. I looked
at one such instance. It’s a migrant story, but of migrant capital
rather than migrant labour, and as I looked into it I began to feel that
the stewards of capital who seemed the obvious beneficiaries of what
was going on had lost control of their own machine. They’d programmed it
to seek only one thing – efficient production – and accordingly, when
the machine set about its task, it attacked the largest obstacle to
efficiency, the wants of its human components, blind to the fact its
programmers depended on these same human wants to validate its
construction.
All factories must close one day, but there’s
something particularly brutal about a factory being closed because its
owners have found cheaper labour elsewhere. The five hundred workers at
Cadbury’s Somerdale chocolate factory in Keynsham near Bristol learned
on 3 October 2007 that most of their highly paid, permanent, solidly
pensioned jobs were to be moved to a new factory in Poland, not because
they had done anything wrong, or because their products weren’t selling,
or because the factory was unprofitable, but because their Polish
replacements could do the same job for less than one fifth of the money.
On the day the announcement was made, the Cadbury bosses locked the
workers out and posted private security guards at the site. Apparently
they feared a violent reaction, but to the shocked people of Keynsham,
where the lights of Somerdale had burned for eighty years, the one-day
lockout looked like an attempt to project onto a guiltless workforce an
act of violence that had emerged from the company boardroom.
‘They
didn’t know the mentality of the Somerdale workers,’ Amoree Radford
said. ‘They would have worked to the death for the factory, but the
directors didn’t know that.’ She’d worked there for ten years and her
daughter Jade and husband Les still had jobs there when the news came.
Dave Silsbury, a Unite official at the factory, worked there for 34
years. His father had worked there; he, his brothers, his daughter and
his son-in-law were employed there when it shut. ‘Cadbury was all we
knew,’ he said. ‘We were institutionalised.’ He was one of the last
workers to leave, haunting its near deserted production halls, packing
up for the auctioneers before the final shutdown in March 2011. By that
time, the production lines had been stopped, one by one, dismantled and
shipped off. The Mini Eggs production line was trucked the thousand
miles to the new factory in the village of Skarbimierz in February 2010.
In March, Caramel and Freddo were moved to Cadbury’s Bournville plant
and Fry’s Chocolate Cream went to Blois in France. In June, the Crunchie
bar line and Fry’s Turkish Delight were moved to Poland, followed in
September by Curly Wurly, and in December by Chomp, Fudge, Picnic and
Double Decker. ‘We watched the last few Double Deckers go through,’ said
Silsbury. Someone took a photo of the final Fudge to come down the
conveyor.
Anna Pasternak, who worked at the new chocolate factory
in Skarbimierz, noticed the age of the equipment on the production
lines. The wear on the metal caused by decades of Somerdale workers’
hands was the only message the British employees sent to their Polish
successors. I met Pasternak in her flat in Brzeg, the nearest sizeable
town to Skarbimierz. I asked her how she felt about what had happened to
the British factory. ‘I never really thought about it,’ she said. ‘We
lost so many jobs here in Brzeg … We didn’t feel sorry that others lost
theirs … It’s somewhere else in the world. We don’t physically know
these people.’
*
Somerdale
had its origins in the chocolate dynasty founded in Bristol in 1753
when Joseph Fry, an apothecary, started selling drinking chocolate from
his shop. He bought out a local cocoa manufacturer and the product
became popular with the tourists taking the waters at Bath. A century
later, the Frys were owners of the largest chocolate factory in the
world. In 1847, they started making the country’s first chocolate bar,
Chocolat Délicieux à Manger. Like Joseph Fry, John Cadbury had gone from
selling cups of drinking chocolate to manufacturing the base product,
in 1831, with the help of a steam engine, in a rented four-storey
building in a back alley in Birmingham. In the early years his cocoa got
a warrant from Queen Victoria but by 1861, when his sons George and
Richard took over the factory, now in different premises, the business
was on the brink. A new product the Cadburys had been counting on to
turn things around, a drink called Iceland Moss, made of cocoa mixed
with lichen, failed to find favour with the public.
The first step
to commercial salvation was the purchase, with the last of George’s
inheritance, of a machine designed by a family of Dutch chocolatiers,
the van Houtens. Up to that point chocolate makers had been held back by
the properties of the cocoa bean, which produced a mixture of cocoa
solids and oily cocoa butter. Because it was hard to separate them,
drinking chocolate tended to be greasy, heavily cut with potato flour or
sago (or lichen) to sop the butter up. The van Houten machine squeezed
most of the fat out of the beans, leaving cocoa solids for a purer
drinking chocolate; the surplus of cocoa butter could be used to make
moulded chocolate for eating.
The second stage in Cadbury’s rise
to dominance was its use of advertising. The openly adulterated nature
of the cocoa on sale in the mid-19th century had made it possible for
less scrupulous manufacturers to touch up their wares with brick dust,
iron filings, even red lead. Cadburys ran a national ad campaign, backed
by the medical establishment, boasting of the unprecedented purity of
the firm’s new product, free of adulterants. Finally they used their
cocoa butter surplus to enter the emerging market for mass-produced
luxury goods, producing a lavish assortment of filled chocolates called
the Fancy Box, decorated with the fussy sentimentality of an
aspirational Victorian parlour. From there the company grew steadily
through the first great age of globalisation until, in 1910, it overtook
Fry, while keeping ahead of the other Quaker confectionery giant,
Rowntree. The main commercial threat was the technology and business
nous of the Swiss – Henri Nestlé, Rodolphe Lindt, Jean Tobler, Philippe
Suchard and Daniel Peter, the inventor of milk chocolate. Just before
the end of the First World War, Cadbury and Fry undertook a defensive
merger to protect themselves against takeover by Nestlé. It turned out
Fry was worth much less than Cadbury; Cadbury accordingly became the
dominant partner. The merger was a takeover in all but name.
*
One of
the reasons for Fry’s relative weakness was the company’s failure to
replace its sprawling, ramshackle network of factories in the middle of
Bristol with a new factory on a greenfield site, as the Cadburys had
done, moving from central Birmingham to Bournville, and Joseph Rowntree,
which shifted production from urban York to suburban Haxby Road. Once
the Cadburys took charge of Fry’s, they enforced change, and in 1920 a
site of nearly 300 acres was bought in a meander of the River Avon, a
few miles east of Bristol, outside the little town of Keynsham. In 1923,
the company announced a contest to give it a ‘brief, easy to pronounce,
striking and unique’ name. The winner was ‘Somerdale’.
The moves
to Bournville, Haxby Road and Somerdale weren’t mere efficiency and tech
upgrades. In its poster announcing the naming contest Fry’s says of the
site: ‘there is ample room, not only for factories, wharves and
sidings, but also for playing fields, bathing pools and sports grounds.’
The Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree families were successful capitalist
industrialists, but they were also Quakers, bound to care for the
welfare of their employees. In the high Victorian age it was still
possible to see a potential harmony between Quaker ideals of simplicity,
temperance, pacifism and charity and the handsome profits made by
Quaker companies like Barclay’s and Lloyd’s banks, Bryant and May
matches, Swan Hunter shipbuilders and Cadbury itself. In Victorian
Britain, Quaker businessmen had competitive advantages. Ron Davies, in
his biography of George Stephenson (Quakers were early financiers of the
railways), talks about a Quaker ‘moral mafia’. In a commercial
landscape filled with fraudsters and dodgy dealers, non-Quakers liked
doing business with the Friends, knowing the extraordinary lengths the
community would go to to vet its members’ entrepreneurial ventures and,
if things went sour, to prevent, or make good, the consequences of bad
loans and bankruptcy. As for the workforce, Robert Fitzgerald, in his
account of the Rowntrees, points out that since ‘business and wealth
were viewed by the Quakers as a God-given trust, labour could not be
treated as a mere commodity’.
In fact, some Quaker industrialists
treated workers very badly, notably Bryant and May. At a time when the
mass of poor Britons were malnourished, under-educated, underpaid,
ill-housed and unprotected against disease, Quakerism wasn’t enough to
make a model employer; nor were the Quakers the only businesspeople to
show more than minimal concern for the welfare of their workers. But for
decades the Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree families seemed to achieve a
particularly successful synthesis of profitable capitalism and private,
paternalistic welfare. At Haxby Road, Bournville and later Somerdale,
there was subsidised housing, healthcare and sports facilities. George
Cadbury partly disinherited his children to build a garden village
around the chocolate factory; Joseph Rowntree built the model village of
New Earswick, and was an early adopter of pensions for his workers. The
Quaker chocolate magnates wanted their factories to be handsome as well
as functional. They wanted them to be surrounded by green spaces. They
cared how their works appeared to God, their workers, their peers and
their neighbours. Their ideology of practical, aesthetic social justice,
formed at the confluence of fundamentalist Protestantism, capitalism,
socialism and the Victorian fascination with an idealised medieval
England, was both contradictory and, to many contemporaries, inspiring.
Over
generations, the original Quaker rigour faded away under the pressure
of the prosperity that rigour had brought them. In 1860, the Quakers
abandoned the requirement that Friends observe ‘plainness of speech,
behaviour and apparel’. Edward Fry accepted the previously unthinkable
worldly honour of a knighthood. George Cadbury moved into a mansion with
thirty servants. In the 1930s, when Rowntree scandalised the Cadburys
and the Frys by trying to patent industrial processes – some Victorian
Quakers had rejected the idea of patents altogether – it was lawyers,
rather than a meeting of the Society of Friends, who settled the
dispute. By the 1960s, members of the Fry and Cadbury families who had
shares in the merged company were clamouring for it to be floated on the
stock market so they could turn their paper assets into money. In 1962,
the deed was done, and Cadbury-Fry was no longer a Quaker venture.
As
much as worldly success, however, it was the success of their ideals
that sped the decline of the crusading wing of Quaker capitalism. Many
of the liberal and socialist ideas the Rowntrees, Cadburys and Frys
campaigned for, and tried to implement on a small scale, were taken up
by the unions, by the Labour movement, and eventually implemented by the
state. This was good and necessary, but had its downside. The
counterpart to the great privatisation of the British economy of the
past forty years is the great nationalisation of culture that occurred
much earlier, when swathes of life that had been covered patchily,
erratically, unfairly and archaically by religion, private employers,
local custom, charities, local committees of worthies and the unreliable
benevolence of the rich – education, healthcare, pensions, safety at
work, women and children’s rights – began to be provided universally by
government. It was a triumph. But it also marked a critical stage in the
depersonalisation of institutional culture. It made it easier for
companies whose owners have no interest in the cultural weight of the
enterprises they control – who see such ideas as history, place,
community, aesthetics and paternalism as outmoded obstacles to
efficiency – to act as if they operate in a space outside culture, even
as their decisions radically transform it.
Post-Quaker Somerdale
was a decent place to work. The residual Quaker legacy, combined with
the power of the unions the Quakers had embraced, meant they were well
paid, with job security, good final salary pensions and paid holidays. A
short walk from the heart of the factory – three long, parallel blocks
four and five storeys high made of brick and steel, with enormous
windows – were the sports club, the football pitches and tennis courts.
In the 1970s the factory had its own chiropodist, dentist and doctor.
And these benefits came without the heavy hand of Quaker paternalism.
The pay was good enough to enjoy the fruits of consumer capitalism – the
foreign holidays, the gadgets and appliances, the nights out and the
hobbies, not just in work, but in retirement – and if some struggled to
make their overtime cover a mortgage or, later in the era, their credit
card debt, they knew the state, up to a point, had their back. Their
children wouldn’t go uneducated, and if they fell sick, they’d be cared
for.
Amoree Radford gave up a job in a bank to work at Somerdale.
Andy Nicholls, who headed the Unite union branch at the factory when the
closure announcement came, started work there in 1972, the year before
Britain joined the EEC. He’d been working as a trainee chef, earning £20
a week, when he saw an advert for a job at Fry’s for £7 a week more.
‘They were pretty desperate for staff,’ he told me. ‘Unless you were
diabolical you couldn’t get turned down.’ He was put on six months’
probation, spending four nights a week making cream teddy bears.
Afterwards he went on to the Fry’s Chocolate Cream production line. The
company had already been making that bar for a hundred years. ‘Funnily
enough it was a popular bar with miners,’ Nicholls said. ‘They used to
dip it in their tea and the glucose would melt and it would help push
the coal dust down their throats.’
He was one of the leaders of
the effort to persuade the Cadbury directors to change their minds about
closure. He encountered a disconnect in his fellow workers’ minds
between what the company was doing and their image of the firm:
There
was a family feeling about the company. One of the problems we had when
we got to the closure programme was people felt so much loyalty to the
company they didn’t want to fight for their jobs, no, ‘Cadbury is
telling us they want to shut down’ … One of our problems when
campaigning was discouraging members from ever telling the press what
their wages were because they were earning anything from £20-50,000.
There was a lot of overtime.
Like
everyone I spoke to in the West of England, Nicholls expressed no
resentment towards the Poles. ‘They want a job just like I do. You can’t
blame the Polish worker. It’s the company.’
I tried to ask the
members of Cadbury’s board at the time about their decision to close
Somerdale. There were three executive directors – Todd Stitzer, the
chief executive, Bob Stack, the chief human resources officer, and Ken
Hanna, the chief financial officer – and a changing cast of nine
non-executive directors. Stitzer eventually walked away with £40 million
in pay, pension and cashed-in shares when he left Cadbury after the
company was swallowed up by another multinational, but at the time the
Somerdale decision was taken the board was coming under fierce pressure
from Cadbury’s big shareholders, particularly the hedge fund partner
Nelson Peltz and his Qatar sovereign wealth fund investors, to deliver
fatter returns on their investment. I contacted the three executive
directors and 11 directors – Sir John Sunderland, Roger Carr, Rick
Braddock, Ellen Marram, Guy Elliott, Rosemary Thorne, David Thompson,
Sanjiv Ahuja, Wolfgang Berndt, Lord Patten and Raymond Viault. Only
Berndt replied (Chris Patten’s assistant told me he was in ‘rural Asia’
without email, then, when the deadline was extended, too ill to
respond). Berndt told me he couldn’t remember whether the entire board
had been asked to sign off on the closure, but remembered that all the
directors were informed, and wholeheartedly endorsed it, ‘while
everybody regretted the loss of jobs’. ‘It is a reality of life,’ he
added, ‘that painful decisions like these are sometimes necessary to
keep a company viable and a responsible and well-paying employer for the
people who remain.’
Nicholls, Silsbury and Radford all voted in
June for Brexit. A few years ago Radford joined Ukip. I met her in her
large, comfortable house in a street within walking distance of the
former factory. She’s still angry about Somerdale, about the
government’s failure to intervene, and as we talked about
chocolate-making’s lack of industrial glamour, a certain amount of
bitterness towards the public in general spilled out. ‘You can’t compare
steel and mining with making chocolate. People didn’t get the history.
It didn’t mean anything to them. They didn’t care whether they were
going to get their Crunchie from Poland.’
We spent a long time
talking about Britain’s post-EU future. Much of what Radford said didn’t
make sense to me; I couldn’t see, for instance, how ‘We want free
trade’ fitted together with ‘Why should we buy Chinese steel, we’ve got
our own?’ Sparring, our voices rose. Partly I still felt raw after the
referendum result. But partly my discomfort was towards the institution I
was defending, because I couldn’t disagree that, in this case, the EU
had let the people of Keynsham down badly. ‘How many billion pounds did
it cost us?’ Radford asked of the new factory in Skarbimierz. ‘Because
it’s in the middle of nowhere. They had to do all the roads, all the
infrastructure, and that was all paid for through our donations.’
Not
all; and not billions. But a sizeable proportion – definitely. And the
full story makes the EU look even worse than Radford knew.
*
On
10 April 1741, the 29-year-old King Frederick II of Prussia fought his
first battle, in deep snow, on a low plateau to the west of the Oder, in
Silesia. It was a chastening experience; he took his senior commander’s
advice to run away, only for the Prussian army to beat his opponents,
the Austrian army of the Hapsburgs, once he’d gone. Frederick’s proxy
victory in the Battle of Mollwitz, named after one of three villages
around the battlefield, was decisive. Silesia would, for the next two
centuries, be part of Prussia and, after unification in 1871, Germany.
In
the 1930s, the Luftwaffe built an airfield on the site of the battle.
During the Second World War, there was a training school for fighter
pilots there. In 1939, a prisoner of war camp, Brieg-Pampitz, was built
near the base. Initially it held Polish and French POWs. After August
1940, it was turned into a slave labour camp. About a thousand Jews were
brought from the ghettos established by the Nazis in Będzin, Sosnowiec
and Czeladź and forced to work in brutal conditions on expanding the
airfield. In the early years sick and exhausted Jewish workers were sent
back to the ghetto, from where many would be sent on to the death
camps. After August 1944, the Jewish prisoners were dispersed – those
unfit for work to Auschwitz, the rest to another labour camp – and
replaced by Poles from the Gestapo’s Pawiak prison in Warsaw, many of
whom later died during the camp’s evacuation.
After the defeat of
Germany, Poland’s borders were shifted westwards. In the east,
territories that had been part of prewar Poland, including large cities,
became part of the Soviet Union (after 1991 they became parts of
Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine). Polish Wilno became Soviet, then
Lithuanian Vilnius; Polish Lwów became Soviet Lvov, then Ukrainian Lviv.
As it lost territory to the USSR in the east, Poland gained from the
old Prussian regions of Germany in the west. German Stettin became
Polish Szczecin; German Breslau, Polish Wrocław; German Brieg, Polish
Brzeg. The triangle of villages around the battlefield turned airfield, a
mile outside Brzeg, were also given Polish names. Mollwitz was renamed
Małujowice. Pampitz became Pępice. The third village, Hermsdorf, was
rechristened Skarbimierz.
Although Silesia hadn’t been under
Polish control since the 14th century, Poland’s new communist government
called it part of the country’s ‘regained lands’. Its German Jews had
been slaughtered by non-Jewish Germans; its non-Jewish Germans mostly
fled, were driven out or interned. Poles seeped in to the depopulated
land, the majority of them from the Kresy, the lost eastern territories,
and repopulated it. They took over apartments, shops and farms, changed
the toponyms, and made Silesia their own.
For much of the time
that Radford, Silsbury and Nicholls worked at Somerdale, Skarbimierz was
a Soviet air-force base, one of the biggest in the Warsaw Pact, where
squadrons of fighter-bombers crouched in readiness for war with Nato.
But communist rule collapsed, the last Soviet flying unit at the base,
the 781st Fighter Aviation Regiment, departed for Smolensk on 10 June
1991, and the airfield went quiet. Somerdale’s nemesis was a farmer and
Polish People’s Party politician called Andrzej Pulit, mayor of
Skarbimierz, who looked at the derelict airfield that dominated his tiny
district and thought: ‘Foreign investors’.
I met Pulit in his
office, in a smart new prefab put up after a bout of flooding. He was
wearing a jacket and a bright red shirt, open at the neck. He was a
small man with a folksy didacticism and a strong resemblance to the late
magician Paul Daniels. He sat at the head of a long table. In front of
him was a copy of the daily Rzeczpospolita with a picture of
Theresa May on the front page. It was mid-January and May had just made
her speech declaring that Britain, as part of leaving the EU, couldn’t
stay in the single market. ‘May: It’s A Full Divorce with the European
Union,’ the headline ran.
‘You kicked yourself in the arse,’ he said.
I told him I was a Remainer, but I did my best to put the Leavers’ case to him. He didn’t buy it.
‘They want to close their country. Whoever does that just loses,’ he said.
We
talked about Somerdale. He ruminated about capital, and Jews, and when I
asked what Jews had to do with it, said: ‘The question is, where’s the
capital which rules this world? … I’m just making a point about who has
the capital: the Jews from the USA. Of course they’re all over the
world, but mainly the US. It’s not that we’re complaining about it. This
is what we’ve waited for, to have this capital coming, so we don’t have
to go around the world searching for work. And now I think our ruling
party has a bad position on foreign capital. They say foreign capital is
not necessarily for us. And this, in my opinion, is bullshit.’
I asked him what he’d say to the workers of Somerdale about most of their jobs being in his village now.
‘I
have a son in France and he earns €4000 a month,’ Pulit said. ‘When he
talks about it, it comes out how people work there. They take it easy.
Nobody cares about their job or pays much attention to it. As far as I
can see that’s the difference. Our people lived through these socialist
times, they experienced the transition, but there, in France, in Great
Britain, they want big social benefits without any increase in
productivity.’
Was he saying British workers were overpaid and lazy?
‘Exactly.
Gypsies go over there from our part of the world because they can get
all these nice social benefits. And now that’s just what’s happening in
Poland, because salaries have grown.’
Many agencies were involved
in bringing foreign investment to Skarbimierz, but Pulit claims the
credit for rallying his district to get its one asset, the abandoned
airfield, into shape to attract the overseas capital that would rescue
the area from the ruins of communism and the free market shock therapy
that followed. Cadbury already had a factory not far away, in Bielany on
the edge of Wrocław, and wanted to expand, but land there cost 190
złoty (€48) a square metre. ‘Here we were basically ready to give the
land away,’ he said. In the end they sold it to Cadbury for 5 złoty
(€1.25) a square metre and promised to fix the roads and install the
necessary services. To fund this the district sold off the old Soviet
barracks at below market value, borrowed money, obtained government
grants set aside for dealing with the legacy of Cold War military
infrastructure, and got help from layers of local government above them.
In the end, by one route or another, much of the money came from the
EU, and although the biggest share would have come from Germany, as the
EU’s biggest net donor, the next largest would have come from Britain.
Apart
from the jobs Cadbury would bring, there was a direct financial
incentive for Pulit and Skarbimierz. In the Polish system, the district,
or gmina, the smallest unit of local government, gets the property
taxes of any business on its territory. Cadbury actually decided to
build two factories in Skarbimierz, one to make chewing gum and, later,
the Somerdale replacement, to make chocolate. Since they opened,
Skarbimierz’s cluster of villages, which only have eight thousand
inhabitants between them, have benefited from 18 million złoty (€4.5
million) in property taxes.
For Cadbury, the incentives were
numerous. The move would replace expensive, unionised workers with cheap
workers in a country where the unions are weak. Much of the cost of the
new factory would be covered by selling the Somerdale site for housing.
Chocolate sales in the eastern EU, Russia and Ukraine (this was before
the Ukrainian rebellions and sanctions against Russia) were growing, and
Skarbimierz was in the middle of the new Europe, rather than, like
Bristol, out on the far fringe of its road system. It’s right next to
the E40, the longest designated Euro-road, which runs west in a straight
line to Calais, and east through Ukraine and Russia to Central Asia. On
top of this, Poland (and the EU) offered one more highly lucrative
incentive. In 2007, Skarbimierz got zoned.
*
The idea
came out of Ireland. In the 1950s Brendan O’Regan, who established the
world’s first duty-free shop at Shannon Airport on Ireland’s west coast,
realised that improved aircraft technology posed a threat to his and
the area’s income. The only reason flights stopped at Shannon was to
refuel before or after crossing the Atlantic; the new generation of
passenger and cargo jets had a longer range, and could fly between their
North American and European hubs without stopping. O’Regan had the idea
of replacing Shannon’s position as a safe haven for global travellers
with a new role as haven for global capital. In 1959 the Irish
government set up the Shannon Free Zone in and around the airport.
Within its perimeter, local and international companies who set up
factories and exported the goods overseas would be exempt from Irish tax
and duties for 25 years.
Companies liked this. Shannon got
businesses and jobs. Variations of the (tax) free zone have since spread
all over the world, from the maquiladoras of Mexico to the Shenzhen
special economic zone, the incubator of China’s economic rise in the
1980s. ‘Shannon has been kind of an inspiration for Chinese leaders
since then,’ Tom Kelleher, a near fifty-year veteran of Shannon Free
Zone and its spin-out consultancies, told me. ‘The Chinese embassy in
London was constantly bringing guys to Shannon, it was a kind of Lourdes
to them. Visit Shannon and you get an indulgence.’ Among the pilgrims
was Xi Jinping, now China’s leader, who paid lavish homage to Shannon on
a visit in 2012. Kelleher was one of the Shannon consultants hired to
design a free zone for Poland in the 1990s. ‘I think Shenzhen had
started at that stage, and somebody said: “If you want to make progress,
a free zone is the answer.” The free zone was the way you went from
communism to capitalism.’
The first ‘special economic zone’ in
Poland opened in Mielec, in the south-east of the country, in 1995. The
city had been devastated by the collapse of work at its main employer,
an aircraft factory dependent on Soviet and Warsaw Pact military
clients. The zone was deemed a success, and 13 others followed, all
centred on areas where the economic slump was especially deep. The idea
was to create business-friendly regulatory islands, but there were big
financial incentives, too. Investors, Polish or foreign, were offered
the chance to pay no tax for ten years, and 50 per cent tax for the next
ten.
When Poland joined the EU in 2004, the rules changed. In
principle the EU bans national subsidies to businesses on the grounds
that it gives those companies an unfair advantage, but it makes an
exception for regions that are significantly poorer than the EU average.
There are many. In Britain today, Cornwall and west Wales come into
this category; the whole of Poland, apart from Warsaw and its environs,
does too.1
Once inside the EU, Poland’s special economic zones had to abide by the
organisation’s caps, but they were free to carry on subsidising. It’s
hard to know exactly how big a subsidy from the Polish government
Cadbury was counting on when it made the decision to close Somerdale,
but one version of the calculation, based on an investment of €250
million, would have given Cadbury a tax break worth about a third of
that.2
In
other words, not only did the EU pay for much of the infrastructure
that enabled Cadbury to shut down its English factory and move it to
Poland; it signed off on a massive financial inducement for Cadbury to
go. It’s the kind of thing that could give a lumbering supranational
bureaucracy a bad name – although not, you would have thought, in
Poland. Yet the system is coming under attack there, too, both from the
defeated and scattered political left and from the victorious Law and
Justice Party. At every level, from Warsaw to the regions, from
government ministers to local party bosses and political appointees, you
hear versions of the same seemingly contradictory Law and Justice line:
we gladly take and deserve the billions of euros we get from the EU,
whose cultural values we openly and contemptuously repudiate. We gladly
receive and welcome the foreign investment that brings jobs, but it’s a
neocolonial relationship; all we do is put parts together.
‘We see
borders open for capital, which is a good thing, but we also see a bad
side to the foreign investment in Poland and other former Soviet Bloc
countries. It wasn’t investment in high-tech industry,’ Maciej Badora,
the president of the zone where Cadbury chose to relocate, told me. ‘The
philosophy has been about cheap labour. They may not see it in Western
Europe, but a lot of economists are pointing out that Eastern Europe has
become like the post-colonial countries. To put it bluntly, we’re just a
big market for them to sell their products and to use our labour.’
I
met Badora in Wałbrzych, a former coalmining town whose miners lost
their livelihood after the fall of communism. It had an urban landscape I
became used to in Silesia outside the big cities: a mix of handsomely
restored (by private and public funds) old German buildings; refurbished
communist-era housing; crumbling, unkempt blocks of all eras that had
been rotting for decades; and the great, windowless, spick and span,
low-rise slabs of factories built by the multinationals. As I drove into
town, the whiteness of the snow emphasised the soot-stained lintels and
cornices and window frames of unrestored stretches of old streets, like
wrinkles round the eyes and mouths of miners who’d fallen asleep
without cleaning the coal dust off their faces. The new industrial areas
seemed to exist in a parallel dimension, adjacent, yet detached.
Badora
operates out of a smart new office building tucked in among the new
factories, between their loading bays and car parks and security guard
booths. He hasn’t been long in the job; he’s a political appointee, put
in place by Law and Justice after he failed to win a parliamentary seat
for the party in the election that brought them to power in 2015.
Look
at Luxembourg’s tax breaks, he said to me, before you complain about
ours. I asked him whether there wasn’t a contradiction between Law and
Justice’s assertion of Poland’s sovereignty, its scepticism about
immigration and multiculturalism and free-flowing global capital, and
its seeming determination to continue embracing foreign investment and
EU aid.
‘If you define traditional Conservative Catholic values
as, for example, honesty, hard work and social solidarity, I don’t see
any contradiction between these traditional values and the global
economy,’ he replied. ‘Globalisation becomes dangerous whenever it gets
rid of values.’
Speaking of solidarity, I said, what about
solidarity with the British workers who lost their jobs when their
factory got moved to Poland?
‘Nobody can better understand this
problem of closing down factories than people from our region. In this
area, especially in the coalmining areas, almost all industry was
liquidated in the 1990s. And we do understand that to close such a
factory, especially one so long-established, is really painful and sad
for local society. But decisions to close down factories are made purely
by companies, and we have no influence.
‘These processes are
going on all over the world, and the difference these days is that
Western Europe society is noticing it more. These countries, until
recently, were totally indifferent; they didn’t pay attention to even
more painful processes going on in Eastern Europe. The only advice they
had for us back then was for us to work harder. We took it as good
advice.’
Talking to Poles in Silesia I was struck by the sense of
economic insecurity and past, or incipient, injustice that lay just
below the surface even among the administrative class. To resentful
Britons, it might seem the Poles of this region are lucky: they can stay
at home, where wages are rising, the infrastructure is being
transformed and jobs are plentiful, or they can get work in Western
Europe, where salaries are much higher. From the point of view of their
Polish counterparts, this is crass nonsense. On the one hand, Poland’s
population is falling and its best and brightest young people are
leaking westwards; on the other, the foreign capital that has brought
the country prosperity has no loyalty to Poland. From Britain to Poland
today; from Poland to an even cheaper country tomorrow. Poles, too, have
their immigrant neuroses. As Britain is to Poland within the EU, so
Poland is to its non-EU neighbour Ukraine.
‘In Poland we lack
doctors, and therefore we have to employ people from Ukraine,’ Badora
said. ‘There is a huge immigration from Ukraine to our country. This is
something Western Europe doesn’t know. It used to be that we only saw
Ukrainian workers in eastern parts of Poland. Now, even here, there are
factories where 40 or 50 per cent of the workers are from Ukraine. They
study here. They rent apartments.’
*
Criticism
of the special economic zone system, which involves Poland essentially
buying jobs on the global investment market in exchange for billions of
euros in foregone corporation tax, is being heard more frequently from
the Polish left. ‘You can think of them as industrial tax havens,’ said
Iwo Augustynski, a Wrocław-based economist and activist with the
left-wing party Razem. ‘When you look at levels of corporation tax in
the EU, Poland has one of the lowest. When you look at the special
economic zones, it’s effectively zero.’
You might assume that,
because Skarbimierz is part of the Wałbrzych zone, it must be part of
the town of Wałbrzych, or at least next to it. It isn’t. It’s eighty
miles away. Since they were set up, the original 14 special economic
zones have speckled the map of Poland with scores of sub-zones,
sometimes even further from their origin. The Mielec zone, for instance,
near the Ukrainian border, is offering land to investors in a sub-zone
450 miles away in Szczecin, on the Baltic, as if a local investment
agency in Sunderland were trying to entice investors to open factories
in Dover. Odder still, in Wrocław, the capital of Silesia, a thriving,
attractive, high-employment city of IT workers and service industries,
zones based in depressed towns far away have bought up development sites
and designated them as aid-worthy sub-zones.
‘We don’t have
unemployment here,’ Augustynski said. ‘Wages are higher than average,
among the highest in Poland. But we still have some zones here, and
there are plans to expand them further. We have a global bank here,
Credit Suisse. There’s an IBM service centre, a Hewlett Packard service
centre. They are all in the city centre. And they’re all in special
economic zones.’
Supporters of the zone system would argue that
Augustynski has his sequence wrong: Credit Suisse, IBM and Hewlett
Packard moved to Wrocław many years ago, not as riders of the wave, but
as part of the reason the wave began to rise. They point out that the
tax exemptions for zone companies do eventually expire. They could point
to the recent pushback for another Swiss bank, UBS – which didn’t get
the zonal designation it wanted for its new service centre in Wrocław,
but moved to the city anyway – as a sign of a new maturity in the Polish
economy.
In 2014, too late for Somerdale, the EU recognised its
error and banned the use of national subsidies to entice multinationals
to move production from one EU country to another. But the EU also
extended the period the Polish zones and sub-zones will be allowed to
operate until 2026. And when you look at the EU’s aid map of Poland,
Augustynski’s case becomes clearer. The poorest parts of Poland, the
areas in most desperate need of jobs, are in the east. Yet the special
economic zones – even, in some cases, zones in the east of the country –
are helping foreign investors set up subsidised factories in the west.
One of the biggest investors in thriving western Poland, just outside
Wrocław, is the Korean company LG. But the sub-zone where LG built its
factories was originally set up to help get jobs in Tarnobrzeg, near
Mielec, 250 miles away in the struggling south-east. The explanation,
according to Augustynski, is simple: the investors, the multinational
firms, are in the driving seat. ‘My complaint is that the main actor,
the main entity who makes the decision about where this investment is,
is the investor,’ Augustynski said. ‘It’s not the local community, local
government, not even the central government, it’s the investor.
Mercedes was the decisive example. They said ‘western Poland’ and when
they got some proposals they chose the one that suited them best. The
Polish administration is a client. It’s got nothing to do with the
unemployment rate in the area or structural economic problems.’
Barbara
Kaśnikowska, who was sacked as president of the Wałbrzych special
economic zone after Law and Justice’s 2015 election victory so the new
government could give Badora her job, agreed that Augustynski had a
point. Sometimes foreign investors would decide where they wanted to
build a factory, then put pressure on the Polish authorities to declare
that place a sub-zone for subsidy purposes. (There is no suggestion that
this is what happened in Cadbury’s case.) But she still had faith the
system was working as it was supposed to. Foreign investors who started
out with simple assembly operations were staying on long after their
subsidies expired; they were using Polish suppliers; those Polish firms
were beginning to supply foreign investors in their home countries;
Poland would become a base for research. The trouble is that the party
now running the country doesn’t share her confidence. Last October
Mateusz Morawiecki, the former banker who, as the new government’s
finance minister, was taken in German and American boardrooms to be a
reliable, globalist, business-as-usual free marketeer, an ally on the
inside, gave a startling interview in which he denounced rich Western
countries for conspiring to keep Poland in a state of economic
dependency. ‘Having reached a peak of development themselves, the rich
countries are now defending deregulation, the liberal approach,
globalisation, because it suits them,’ he said. The IMF itself, he
claimed, had concluded that ‘in countries like Poland the cost of the
traditional neoliberal model exceeded the benefit.’
*
The chocolate factory
was built as planned in Skarbimierz, except for one detail: it no
longer belonged to Cadbury. A few months before Skarbimierz began
production in 2010, Cadbury was bought for £11.5 billion in a hostile
takeover by Kraft Foods, a US conglomerate four times its size. During
the takeover, Kraft had promised to keep production at Somerdale, but
once it had the British company, it reneged and went ahead with the
closure. Two years later, Kraft spun off its stagnant North American
processed foods business, leaving a vast global enterprise that it hoped
would grow through heavy marketing of sugary snacks to newly prosperous
families in India, Latin America, Africa, east Asia and Eastern Europe –
households, for instance, with family members who worked in a new
factory built by a multinational. After an internal contest to find a
name for the reconfigured company, it was called Mondelez, meaning
‘world delicious’ in a nonce pidgin Esperanto.
From Wrocław, where
I stayed, it was less than an hour’s drive along the E40 to the
Mondelez factories in Skarbimierz. You leave the solid grandeur of
central Wrocław and the jostle of its shiny new office districts (the
city was almost destroyed in 1945, when it was one of the last Nazi
strongholds to fall to the Red Army) and hit the new factory and
warehouse areas. Modern factory architecture, low, windowless,
hangar-like, looms all around. No matter how close you get, the
buildings lie: they never stand. The exit from Wrocław is marked by a
sprawling Tesco, an enormous Ikea (not that there are non-enormous
versions), the older Mondelez factory – still with its Cadbury sign –
and by Amazon warehouses bigger than any of them. Factories on the flat
horizon mark the land, but they aren’t landmarks.
The two new
Mondelez factories in Skarbimierz, one for gum and one for chocolate,
have roofed over seven and a half acres. The chocolate factory is a
giant shed, a blank oblong with a series of slightly higher blank
oblongs jutting out of it. Most new factories are monochrome but the
Mondelez factory is two-tone – grey and another, darker grey. It is
digital-neat, as if it hadn’t so much been built as computer-rendered
onto the bright white snow. On either side are other industrial sheds,
nodes in the global supply chain: a distribution centre for the
Portuguese food company Jerónimo Martins, an air filter plant built by
the Minneapolis firm Donaldson and a car-seat maker, Johnson Controls,
based in Wisconsin.
There’s a set of turnstiles in the fence
around the factory but nobody stopped me going through. A sign promoted a
kind of managerial cult called Integrated Lean 6 Sigma, designed to
reduce defects on the production line. A slogan in multicoloured letters
on the corner of the factory exhorted employees to work, have fun, and live safely. I peered through the glass entrance doors. Another poster read connected through joy. A quizzical security guard wandered towards me. I hadn’t told Mondelez I was coming. I made myself scarce.
Just
behind the factory, the remains of the old runway are still there.
Driving along the road on the far side of the plant you start to see the
characteristic shape of military aircraft shelters among the trees,
barn-like structures with thick walls and heavy metal doors designed to
protect Soviet aircraft from attack by Nato. I had lunch in a restaurant
close to the industrial area. Judging by the decor and the prices it
was aimed at the new executive class, the supplier representatives, the
local managers and the head office mandarins passing through on
inspection. I found out later that there’s a memorial nearby to the
labour camp, put up by local Polish groups in 1998. The inscription
reads ‘Prisoners of various nationalities worked here on the
construction of the local airfield; among them were soldiers of the
Polish national army, many of whom were killed.’ The plaque bears the
Christian cross and the Kotwica, the wartime symbol of the Polish
resistance, later adopted by anti-communists. There is no Jewish star.
The
block in Brzeg where the former chocolate factory worker Anna Pasternak
lives, a five-storey prewar German apartment building, had just been
restored and painted cream and green, the stucco swags around the
bullseye windows in the loft painstakingly re-created. A small red sign
in front directs patrons to an Erotic Shop down a side street. On the
other side of the road, a building once the equal of Pasternak’s stands
derelict, sprayed with tags, its windows smashed, crumbling brickwork
shedding plaster. Further along are twin 14-storey communist-era tower
blocks, perilously conjoined by a flimsy walkway at their top corners,
their recent coat of jaunty pink starting to grime up.
Pasternak’s
parents, who bought the flat from the state, recently handed it over to
her and retired to their hometown in the east of the country. The flat
has big rooms, high ceilings, yellow and lime walls, and an enormous pot
plant towering over the TV. Pasternak was on her laptop when I arrived.
Its cooling system was broken and she had it sat on her coffee table on
a layer of empty dessert tins to stop it overheating. She’s 37 years
old, an engineer and an improviser, and her work history is a paradigm
of Silesia’s recent economic frenzy. She finished high school in 2003
and began an eight-year course of studies at a series of vocational
schools, learning to build, control and manage assembly lines. From the
start, she worked at the same time, studying at the weekend and working
all week. Her first job was at a chicken factory in Opole, the capital
of the province where Brzeg and Skarbimierz lie, up the river Oder in
the opposite direction from Wrocław. Every day the chicken factory bus
would pick Pasternak up from Brzeg at 4.05 a.m. and wind through a
string of villages, gathering workers. ‘It took around one and a half
hours to get to the factory, you did eight hours’ work, and you were
home by 3.45. We started with a live chicken, then it was cut and
processed and it would come out on trays. It wasn’t very skilled. The
requirements were not high. You just had to have been to school, have a
health certificate and be willing to work.’ She got 850 złoty a month,
cash in hand, about €212 at today’s exchange rates. ‘It lasted ten
months,’ she said. ‘They fired me when they found out I was studying.’
Her
next job was on the checkout of one of the foreign supermarkets that
had rushed into Poland on accession. There she only got 800 złoty a
month (€200) but she was glad of the work. ‘Back then you would take any
job. The unemployment round here was around 50 or 60 per cent so if you
got any job you clung to it with your hands and feet.
‘The
supermarkets came in kind of gradually, and then, when the chewing gum
factory was built, there was another factory, another, boom, boom!
People were glad. Suddenly we could choose to work here, or there.’
In
2005, Toyota built a diesel engine factory in one of the Wałbrzych
sub-zones 15 miles away. Pasternak got a job on the production line. It
was her first experience of working as one human component in a
multinational, in a single global manufacturing, assembling and
distribution system, encompassing more than 300,000 workers in 53
factories in 28 countries. The work consisted of a single set of
procedures, lasting a minute, that she’d repeat 445 times in the course
of an eight-hour day, starting at 6 a.m. At eight she’d get an
eight-minute break; at ten, twenty minutes; at noon, seven minutes.
She
described a typical series of repeating assembly actions. ‘I had my
square metre of the shop floor and I’d operate there for the whole day.
The production line would be moving, I’d take a connecting rod, put
rings on it, then place a piston on top and block it with a gudgeon pin.
After that I’d place the assembled piston in a special basket and it
would go to another person who was assembling it with cylinders.’ There
was leeway for about five seconds either way, for someone else to make
up your delay, or for you to make up someone else’s. Any more than five
seconds and the whole assembly line would stop. Seventy people would be
left standing idle. ‘There was no time for talking, plus it was super
loud in the factory, so we all had earplugs, and could only communicate
by nodding heads and with the eyes.’ For this, Pasternak took home 1200
złoty a month (€300) – a 50 per cent increase on her wages in the
supermarket. Today, the basic take-home pay for a production line worker
in one of Toyota’s British plants, where some of these engines were
destined, is €1600 a month, and the breaks add up to 55 minutes,
compared to the 35 Pasternak got.
Pasternak got a job at Cadbury’s
new gum factory in Skarbimierz in 2009, as Mondelez was about to take
over. The work was easier than at Toyota – ‘I just had to stand there
and see everything was working’ – and the pay better, the highest of any
factory in the area, at 1500 złoty (€375) a month. In five years, her
salary had almost doubled. She got private health insurance, a card
entitling her to use private sports facilities, and a free bus on the
short ride to work.
One former union official from the gum plant,
who asked not to be named, told me that the factory worked well for the
first year and a half, when Spanish, French and American managers were
running it, but conditions worsened when Polish human resources staff
were brought in. Union representation was weak; only one in four workers
belonged to a union, and the union officials were inexperienced and
poorly supported by their national organisation. Full-time contracts
were replaced by temporary contracts; pay was cut. Union officials
complained they were subjected to relentless management bullying. In
2011 the union leader at the Mondelez factory, Tomasz Wachowski, was
fired for allegedly aggressive behaviour at work. He won his case for
unfair dismissal but by that time he’d already moved to the Netherlands.
Soon afterwards his deputy was fired, and such power as the union had
was broken.
‘These multinational companies, they don’t just move
production to countries that are cheaper, but also to places where
workers are easier to manipulate, where there are no strong traditions
of worker unions,’ Wachowski told me from Holland on Skype. ‘We had no
previous experience. We got no help from the union. We were like a leaf
in the wind.’
An anonymous spokesman for Mondelez in Poland said,
by email: ‘In general we have a constructive relationship with our
labour representatives. We are not aware of any Polish industrial
tribunal in this case … We do not accept any kind of discrimination,
bullying or victimisation.’ Pasternak – who wasn’t a union member, and
spoke of the union in question, Solidarity, as ‘totally incompetent’ –
said she’d been promised, when she started work at Mondelez, that she’d
get a full-time contract after 15 months. Before the 15 months were up,
she was told full-time jobs were no longer on offer; nobody would get
more than a two-year contract.
Then the world went off gum. Sales
plummeted. There were rumours the plant would be closed completely.
Local managers reacted harshly. In 2013, rather than formally announcing
that a certain number of people would be laid off, they sought
justification for firing people, one by one. ‘Basically they fired
anyone who’d taken too much sick leave, or talked too much, or expressed
dissent,’ Pasternak said. ‘In my case, it wasn’t allowed to bring a
mobile phone into the factory, and one day I just had to have my phone
with me … I just took a look to see whether I’d received a message and I
was seen by a supervisor – not even mine! – and because they were
looking for reasons to fire people, they fired me.’
Pasternak
found another job in a nappy factory built by the Swedish firm SCA in
another Wałbrzych sub-zone, in the town of Oława. To get it, she was
obliged to be employed not by SCA directly, but by an agency, on a new
kind of contract. Formally, the contract was full-time, but in practice,
it was only good for a month. Every month she’d get a text message from
the agency telling her whether she still had a job or not. In 2015, she
found work at the Mondelez chocolate factory, on similar terms. It was a
seasonal job, from May till November, packing chocolate bars into
Cadbury’s ‘selection boxes’ – Mondelez still uses the Cadbury brand name
– for Christmas. For 24 hours a day, three shifts of sixty to seventy
people worked a 100-metre packing line. Pasternak liked the job and the
banter, and in a good month she could earn 2000 zloty (€500). She didn’t
get the full-time job she wanted, and the next year, she came back.
This
time, Mondelez employed her for the whole season, instead of making her
endure the monthly wait to see whether her contract would be extended.
But the pay was lower than the year before, and the supervisors made
them work harder. They were desperately short-handed, sometimes missing a
third of the shift, but they were expected to stuff selection boxes and
imitation Christmas stockings with Crunchie bars and Curly Wurlys at a
faster rate. ‘In chocolate the job was physically exhausting, you had to
work hard and fast and the wages were much lower,’ Pasternak said.
‘People felt they were being treated like garbage. The team leader would
come over and yell at us: “You’re the worst brigade in the plant! If
you can’t cope with this, you’re the worst!”’Pasternak left before the
end of the season and got a job at Donaldson. She’s still waiting for a
permanent contract.
Mondelez Poland said it employed ‘around four
hundred people’ on ‘permanent contracts’ and a ‘variable’ number on
temporary contracts. But under Polish law, a ‘permanent’ contract can
actually mean a job that is renewed, or not, every month. Poland leads
the EU in temporary contracts, by some margin: 22 per cent of its
workforce is on one. Employment agencies in Poland keep coming up with
new variants; one agency offered Ukrainian workers with a year’s
guarantee, like a domestic appliance. ‘They recruit in Ukraine and give
an employer a warranty – this person will work for one year, and if not,
we’ll replace them with someone else, equally qualified,’ was how
Kaśnikowska described it.
*
Temporary jobs;
temporary factories. In 2009 the first multinational to invest in the
Wałbrzych zone, the Japanese car parts maker Takata Petri, closed its
plant with the loss of 600 jobs and moved production to a special
economic zone in Romania, where workers are cheaper. In 1996, in
Britain, the Welsh Development Agency agreed a £124 million grant to LG
electronics on its promise to invest £1.7 billion and create six
thousand jobs. In the end, LG invested much less and ten years later
shut down its last assembly lines in Wales, as it ramped up production
at its new, subsidised plant outside Wałbrzych. Now LG is sharply
cutting jobs at its Polish plant.
Iwo Augustynski was in no doubt
that globalisation, unemployment and inequality were behind the success
of Law and Justice. The contradictions in their response, he said, were
to the party’s advantage. ‘They don’t need to find solutions,’ he said.
‘It’s conflict that gives them power, not solutions.’
I suggested
to Maciej Stefanski, the Law and Justice leader and administration head
in Brzeg county, which includes the district of Skarbimierz, that it was
unwholesome to make so much of his party’s concern over the damage
globalisation and multiculturalism was doing to Poland, while accepting
the iron rules of the free market when the damage was done to the
cultural fabric of another country and Poland benefited. But he wasn’t
buying it; and besides, Mondelez, in its only concession to the fact
that it exists in the local space of Brzeg, sponsors the town’s
Christmas lights. ‘Poles really value freedom,’ he said. ‘This freedom
we fought for after 130 years of Polish partition. We don’t like it when
people from outside try to influence our internal affairs, as the EU
does very often. Patriotism is very important to us. It doesn’t mean
we’re against the free markets. We think the special economic zones have
enriched Poland.’
Stefanski’s office, in another nicely restored
prewar building, is cluttered with furniture and knick-knacks. There’s a
painting of Polish cavalry, another of Józef Piłsudski, who drove the
Red Army back from the edge of Warsaw after the Russian Revolution, and a
photograph of the town’s monument to Pope John Paul II. Images of the
same two inspirational figures, by all accounts, adorn the office of the
effective leader of Stefanski’s party, the former lawyer, former
Solidarity activist, former child actor and current conspiracy theorist
Jarosław Kaczyński; portals to the psychic hinterland of his movement, a
hinterland of Polish Catholicism, martyrdom, suffering, heroism, the
battle between good and evil, tattered flags, last stands, saints,
miracles, blood, incense, cordite.
Formally Kaczyński holds no
office save a seat in parliament. Since his mother died he lives alone,
with his cat Fiona, leaving him plenty of time to read Thomas Piketty
and Carl Schmitt. He always wears black, in mourning for his twin
brother, killed in a plane crash near Smolensk in 2010 that Kaczyński
variously blames, without any evidence, on Russia and the then Polish
prime minister, Donald Tusk. Everyone assumes the president and prime
minister only govern on Jarosław Kaczyński’s behalf, that he is the true
authority in Poland.
The authority dislikes many things:
homosexuals, immigrants, women’s reproductive rights, atheists,
criticism, dissent. Since coming to power in 2015, the Law and Justice
government has taken over public broadcasting, filling it with fawning
loyalists and right-wing polemicists on the Russian model. Some 118
journalists have been fired; in one case, six producers and journalists
lost their jobs when they refused to prepare a false story smearing the
opposition. State TV dropped its annual coverage of Poland’s biggest
charity event, which raises millions each year for the treatment of sick
children, and cut any mention of it from its news programmes, because
its organiser also campaigns for the rights of sexual minorities. The
government did away with the independence of the chief prosecutor. It
tore up the rules intended to ensure senior civil servants are
qualified, recruited in open competition, and protected from arbitrary
dismissal. The head of the prime minister’s office has spoken openly of
firing any civil servant suspected of being infected with the ‘social
pathology’ of the previous pro-European, socially liberal, economically
centre-right government. The government violated the constitution in
order to gain control of the constitutional tribunal, the court that
rules on whether laws are constitutional or not. Law and Justice openly
encourages emnity towards refugees; just before the election, Kaczyński
said they were carriers of cholera and dysentry and ‘other, even more
severe diseases’. The party backed a bill that would have made abortion
absolutely illegal, even in cases of rape, incest or when the mother’s
life was in danger, and pulled back only after demonstrations. It then
passed a law obstructing demonstrations by allowing loyalist groups to
reserve potential protest sites indefinitely. It has appointed a
militant anti-contraception Catholic theologian to advise on a new sex
education course for schools. Senior priests and Law and Justice boost
each other. Kaczyński says that ‘there are no other moral guideposts in
Poland apart from the teachings of the Catholic Church.’ In a sermon the
archbishop of Przemyśl accused opposition MEPs who criticise Law and
Justice in the European Parliament of ‘fomenting hatred against Poland’.
Law
and Justice MEPs sit in the same group as British Conservatives. Ashley
Fox, leader of the Tory group in the European Parliament, came to the
new government’s defence over the criticism it has received from Western
media and from the European Commission. Even though Brexit threatens
Poland with a significant cut to its EU funding, and means difficulties
for Poles in the UK, Kaczyński has been energised by it, seeming to
believe the shock of Brexit will force Germany and France to give Poland
the freedom of action he wants it to have within the EU. In a recent
interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung he portrayed
the EU as a creature of Germany, a country in thrall to left-wing ideas,
which had pushed Britain towards Brexit as a result of its enforcement
of a pro-homosexual ideology. Kaczyński doesn’t want to leave the EU: he
wants the EU to leave the EU. Whether you call this a bluff, or a
calculation that Western Europe has invested too much in Poland not to
give it what it wants, Kaczyński is raising the possibility, however
remotely, of Poland parting company with the bloc. To be pushed out by
an exasperated Germany would be the perfect bloodless modern martyrdom
for a modern Poland. But the special economic zones might not look so
special afterwards.
Tomasz Wachowski, the sacked union leader at
Cadbury’s gum factory in Skarbimierz, posted ‘well done Britain!’ on his
Facebook page the day after the Brexit referendum, although he was
evasive when I asked him about it. When he lived in Brzeg, he was a
founding member of the local branch of the extreme right-wing movement
ONR. His sacked deputy was a Law and Justice supporter. Anna Pasternak
was hostile; the party’s attempts to establish a religious state annoyed
her. But nor did she care for Civic Platform, Law and Justice’s
economically centre-right, socially liberal rivals, who ruled Poland for
eight years before Kaczyński’s triumph. Like almost half of Polish
voters, she sat out the 2015 election. Brexit was won on the votes of
more than a third of the electorate; the Conservatives and Donald Trump
won power in Britain and the US with the support of a quarter; Law and
Justice won it with the support of less than a fifth. The more important
question for the Polish opposition is not ‘How could they vote for that?’
but ‘Why did they prefer not to vote at all than vote for us?’ The
populism of Law and Justice is much better known outside Poland than the
un-populism of Civic Platform, which raised the pension age, raised VAT
– the tax that hits the poor the hardest – and bent over backwards to
please foreign investors.
Law and Justice restored the old
retirement age and introduced a hefty non-means tested child benefit
allowance of 500 złoty a month (€125) for a couple or single parent with
a second child, to be funded at least partly by new taxes on foreign
investors: not those who built factories – not yet – but those who’ve
come to dominate shopping and retail banking. It also increased the
minimum wage. Civic Platform doesn’t ask what makes these policies
popular: inequality caused by an unfair tax system? Resentment towards
foreign supermarkets for the crushing of small Polish shops? A sense
that low birth rates threaten Poland’s existence? Instead it
characterises them as reckless handouts that will destroy the economy.
One of the nails in Civic Platform’s coffin was a series of transcripts
of secret recordings of conversations between government officials
published in 2014 in the magazine Wprost. Civic Platform, the
champion of press freedom, sent in the security services in an
unsuccessful attempt to seize the recordings. On one of the tapes a
Civic Platform minister, now an EU commissioner, can be heard telling
the country’s anti-corruption chief that ‘only an idiot would work for
less than 6000 złoty a month’ – €1500, twice Poland’s average salary.
Barbara
Kaśnikowska, the shrewd former head of Wałbrzych zone, suggests,
persuasively, that Law and Justice benefited from resentment not of the
have-nots towards the haves, but between haves; that as Poland boomed,
ordinary people didn’t resent those who’d become super-rich so much as
people just like them who, for no good reason, earned twice or three
times as much as they did. In her view, Poland’s non-voters didn’t
despise Civic Platform: they took its achievements for granted. A Pole,
on this analysis, is much more likely to vote to say ‘screw you’ when
they are angry than ‘thanks!’ when all’s going well. You can see her
point. Andrzej Buła, the marshal of Opole and Civic Platform leader in
the province, told me that the EU was funding 40 per cent of the
provincial budget, while unemployment had dropped from 14 to 8 per cent.
In some counties it’s as low as 5 per cent – essentially full
employment. Without the Ukrainians, he said, they’d be short-handed. Yet
in the 2015 parliamentary elections Civic Platform lost Opole on a
swing of 40 per cent to Law and Justice.
There’s a word for the
work of those who navigate the single field that unites culture and the
economy in people’s minds: politics. Whatever they are doing, Law and
Justice, Ukip and the English nationalist wing of the Tory Party are
doing politics. New Labour, the Tory neoliberal wing and, perhaps, Civic
Platform, have drifted into something else. Most shareholder-owned
multinationals, away from their home countries, attempted to opt out of
culture a long time ago. Instead of forcibly reminding them that they
were always part of local culture, whether they wanted to be or not,
parties like Civic Platform and New Labour followed business, and began
treating economics and culture as two separate things. Out of power, the
separation continues, manifesting itself as a split between those
waiting for the populists to be destroyed by economic disaster, and
those who protest, reactively and sequentially, against each new
cultural outrage. In Britain, seen from the point of view of the workers
at Somerdale, the politicians of the first decade of the 21st century
merged their vision with the governing ethos of multinational
corporations like the once paternalistic Cadbury, the ethos of overpaid
bosses and the drive for yield on behalf of remote institutional
investors. In Poland, Catholic and post-communist culture struggle to
interact with the faith-blind, place-blind, history-blind giants of
global industry.
One of Cadbury’s early acquisitions in Poland was
Wedel, a chocolate company founded as a family business in Warsaw in
the mid-19th century which by the 1930s had grown to be a thriving
example of paternalistic capitalism, offering its workforce healthcare,
education and housing benefits. The main Wedel factory was destroyed
during the Warsaw Uprising. Jan Wedel rebuilt it. The communists
nationalised it. The post-communists privatised it. Pepsi bought it.
Pepsi sold it to Cadbury. When Skarbimierz was being built, there were
fears the strongly unionised Wedel factory would be closed, but it
didn’t happen, partly because of a campaign to save it, supported by the
then mayor of Warsaw, the late Lech Kaczyński, twin brother of
Jarosław.3
Dariusz Skorek, a union leader at the Wedel plant, told me when I met
him in Warsaw that although his union, Solidarity, tended to be
described as ‘socialist’, he was, politically, on the other side.
‘The
Solidarity movement,’ he said, ‘is based on Christian values, on
right-wing ideology. We were always in opposition to the previous
government, but Law and Justice – of course they’re making a lot of
mistakes, but it’s a government that’s finally started to do something
for the workers.
‘It’s hard for unions in Europe in general, but
here, the attitude under the previous government was that they should be
destroyed, and there would be no obstacles to foreign investment. I
know what people in the rest of Europe are thinking about our current
government but from the employee and union point of view, it’s our government.’
*
There’s
an alternative narrative to the Somerdale-as-tragedy story. Cadbury’s
closure announcement didn’t come as a complete shock: workers had
noticed that the firm had stopped investing in the building. There were
leaks in the roof. Rumours that the factory’s days were numbered went
back at least as far as 1978, when Dave Silsbury started work. Then,
5000 people worked there. By 2007, outsourcing and automation had
whittled the numbers down to a tenth of that. ‘It was almost unthinkable
that a machine could wrap an Easter egg, because of the nature of the
product and the shape of the egg, but now they can,’ Barrie Roberts, a
national official from Unite, told me. Because workers in Poland were so
much cheaper, automation actually took a step backwards when production
moved; the honeycombed sugar in Crunchie bars, which at Somerdale had
been automatically cut with high-speed jets of oil, reverted in Poland
to being cut the old labour-intensive way with saws. Cadbury could have
had a fight on its hands over closure. It had three other factories in
Britain, and the national union was ready to support the Somerdale
workforce if they chose to strike. But they didn’t. Many workers were
nearing retirement age, the company’s redundancy terms seemed generous,
and in the end the majority (not Silsbury or Nicholls) voted 70 to 30 to
accept.
After a few tough years, Silsbury and his son have found
full-time jobs at a local food additives company called TasteTech. Among
its customers is the Mondelez chocolate factory in Skarbimierz, part of
the £3.8 billion worth of goods Britain exports to Poland every year.
This year, Silsbury turns 55, and gets to access his £100,000 redundancy
payment, which he put away in a pension account. ‘Keynsham’s moved on,’
he said. ‘I thought there would be a bigger impact than there was. Now
it’s just as if it was never there.’
Somerdale’s best playing
fields (the ones that don’t flood) have been built over. The architects
have made some effort to design the new houses in keeping with the
housing built by the company in its Quaker days. But prices are high;
it’s an easy commute to Bristol. The core of the factory itself is being
converted into retirement flats. A gigantic sign, designed to be seen
from the London to Bristol railway line, advertises the new
development’s name, the Chocolate Quarter. A sports club has been built
to replace the demolished Fry Club. In repudiation of its Quaker
heritage, it has a bar.
Although the ex-Somerdale workers I spoke
to voted Leave, the area as a whole didn’t. It’s in one of the
prosperous Remainer corridors that stretches out from London towards
cities of tecchies, hipsters, students, academics, bankers and
cosmopolitan retirees: Cambridge, Brighton, Bristol. Matt Cross, the
nearest thing Bristol has to a Maciej Badora – he’s director of
investment at an agency called Invest Bristol & Bath – told me the
UK was at the top of an evolutionary tree of skills, and as low-skilled
factory jobs went to cheaper countries, new, high-wage, high-skill jobs
were being generated, not necessarily when foreign investors came in,
but sometimes, counter-intuitively, when they moved out, releasing
highly-qualified people into the West Country’s ferment of start-ups. A
spokesperson for Mondelez, Gemma Pryor, told me the company had
increased the number of researchers working on its products in Britain
from 25 to 250, intended to keep all its remaining British factories
going, and was ‘upskilling our wider workforce at Bournville’, where £75
million has been invested to keep manufacturing going ‘for the next
generation’.
True, the optimistic version of the story goes, the
EU was wrong to allow Poland to offer Cadbury a subsidy to move. But in
the long run, in Europe as a whole, everyone benefits. Eastern Europe
gets richer and catches up with Western Europe; instead of 400 million
people working and shopping and 100 million people working and queuing,
you have 500 million people working and shopping. A bigger market,
greater prosperity for all, a peaceful commonwealth, warplanes into
chocolate.
The chief of the many flaws in this version is that at
both ends of the Somerdale-Skarbimierz journey, the new jobs are worse
than the old Somerdale ones. Even supposing all the redundant Somerdale
workers, and their children, found similar low-skilled jobs, they would
never be as well-paid as they were at Somerdale, and, crucially,
wouldn’t have the same generous final salary pensions. Some of the
Somerdale workers’ children, no doubt, will enter the higher-wage
higher-skill world of the professional tech class, but the flipside of
Matt Cross’s optimism is that those jobs will be few, and the zero-hours
army many. The outflow of old-style manufacturing jobs, with good pay,
conditions and pensions, couldn’t be matched by any foreseeable inflow.
‘People at the lower end of the workforce,’ Cross said, ‘start to lose
their engagement in the workforce and the jobs they can get are very
temporary jobs, minimum wage jobs, the Sports Direct-type model.’
‘They
weren’t our jobs,’ Silsbury told me, explaining why, in spite of the
good redundancy offer, he’d been ready to fight for Somerdale. ‘We were
just the keepers of those jobs. We needed to hand them down to our
children and our children’s children.’ Nicholls said he’d been able to
retire at 57 and live comfortably, without working, on his Cadbury’s
pension. He has a caravan in Dorset; he goes fishing; he visits National
Trust properties. Shareholder capitalism’s race to the bottom means
that the generations of non-graduates who come after him – ‘there’s
nothing wrong with someone who hasn’t got the ability to be a thinker’ –
face precarious decades of low-wage warehouse work, followed by poverty
on the state pension. Nicholls started out as a trainee chef; now his
son is one. But his son is 32. He earns just above the minimum wage and
has no Cadbury’s to move to. Nicholls’s daughter works for the RSPCA.
‘She’ll never get a big pension, so that’s where she’ll lose out. She’ll
always be like she is now, just managing.
‘What we had, if you
stuck with it, you saw an end game. Now there’s no end game. You keep
your head above water but the rewards, at the end, don’t come through.
Once Thatcher started her game and sold off our houses, our kids are in
private rented property, and that seems to go up every year, and wages
don’t. It’s going to be a just-managing society. In our generation, the
state pension is like a top-up. We are going to have a generation going
back to living on the state pension, like the 1930s and 1940s. Do we
really want to go back there?’
At Mondelez in Skarbimierz, where
casualisation, cost-cutting and fears of being undercut by cheaper
labour elsewhere prevail, the target the workers are theoretically
aiming for, economic parity with Western Europe, is disappearing from
view. The equilibrium, in other words, when the Poles catch up with the
Britons, will see a European economy that is, overall, much bigger, but
where working-class Britons will have fallen back, and working-class
Poles will never enjoy the security and prosperity of their vanished
British counterparts in what now seems a mid-20th-century golden age.
Scaled up to the global level you have a system which, in its search for
short-term efficiency and capital yield, restricts the power much of
humanity has to consume what it produces. Multinational manufacturers of
consumer goods cut their costs to the bone, sweating their wage and
pension bill and buying up robots to deliver yield to the pension funds
and sovereign wealth funds and hedge funds and wealthy families that own
them; but who then will be able to afford the consumer goods? Those
people who work for the other guy? But the other guy is doing the same
thing. And robots don’t eat chocolate.
