Poland: When Dual Earnership Is not Enough

Abstract

In an article which they described as an ‘introductory exploration of the topic’, Kozek et al. (2005: 1) claim that the ‘working poor’ phenomenon has so far been absent from the Polish scientific discourse. Unlike unemployment, of which a sudden rise in the 1990s quickly attracted the attention of domestic and foreign scholars and policy makers (Spieser, 2007), in-work poverty (IWP) is still ‘almost non-existent on the agenda of policy-makers, employee or employer representatives’ in Poland (Towalski and Kuzmicz, 2010). However, driven by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound), the Polish Public Opinion Research Centre (CBOS) recently published a report on IWP in Poland (Kuzmicz and Stasiowski, 2008) which served as the basis of the Polish section of the 2010 Working Poor in Europe study published by Eurofound. The CBOS report uses the Eurostat definition of IWP with one small difference: while Eurostat only considers as ‘working’ those individuals who were in employment for half of the period for which they declared income, in its survey the CBOS didn’t ask respondents about the number of months they have spent in employment during the previous year.