Just this morning a friend called to tell me about the trouble he was having with an employer who is withholding his pay for some unknown reason. No reason was given ... only that "something" wasn't right with "the paperwork". Ok. Enough.
I have had similar experiences here in Poland. I do not understand why an employer thinks there is any justification whatsoever to not pay an employee at the proper time and in the proper manner. In my case, there was constant postponement for some "technical" reason. The employer first paid me a substantially lower amount that I was due and then took almost an entire month to fix its error. Needless to say, I was furious.
I have another friend here from the UK who has basically said that he will only do business with non-Poland based companies because he was "sick and tired of Poland-based companies playing with money that was due him".
These are just some of the complaints I have heard from my non-native friends. My friends that are Polish seem to just accept that this is the way business is done here.
I have chosen to live here and I have also chosen to accept the practices and customs of my new home. With that said, I cannot see how any business expects to broaden their scope and reach with the way salary/money/contracts is handled. This is not to say there aren't similar problems in my native country. Of course there is. The difference is that the US has laws in place to punish this criminal activity ... and make no mistake, it is criminal. The pure corruption at the root of these aforementioned practices in Poland are criminal. It seems as if it is alright to cheat employees and treat this behavior as acceptable because the employee has very little to extremely difficult recourse. It has to change if Poland is to play in the big league.
It is the same in Korea. I've found that if you work at a small family business type of enterprise the odds of you getting jerked go up a 1000% percent. I think that on a psychological level the work you do is so distant from the time you get paid that the two things aren't connected in the minds of business owners. So the money they pay feels like a gift and they resent you for it. In America you get paid every two weeks so the labor and the payment are much more connected.
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