polish plumber

I saw this story in the New York Times (pasted in -- hope the NYtimes doesn't mind!). I find the whole thing a little exasperating, considering (as the article mentions) how impossible it is to get ahold of plumbers in France. Here in Grenoble, you are lucky to get anything but a pair of delinquent teens to begrudgingly install a new water heater. And you can count on them simultaneously destroying a wall, toilet and floor in the process. But oh no, we wouldn't want access to an *actual* plumber if they're foreign! Also, today our on site cafeteria workers were on strike.

June 26, 2005


Unlikely Hero in Europe's Spat: The 'Polish Plumber'

By ELAINE SCIOLINO

PARIS, June 25 - Blond, buffed and blow-dried, a come-hither half-smile on his face, the man in the travel ad grips the tools of his trade as he beckons visitors to Poland.

"I'm staying in Poland," the man says, a set of strategically placed pipes in one hand, a metal-cutter in the other. "Lots of you should come."

He is the "Polish plumber," a mythical figure who became a central actor in the debate in France over the European Union constitution, which was roundly rejected by French voters last month. Portrayed as a predator who would move to France and steal jobs by working for less pay, this "plumber" has come to personify French fears about the future.

Now the Polish Tourism Bureau is using the character to try to allay French fears and attract visitors at the same time.

"With all the bad publicity about the 'Polish plumber,' we thought why not have a sense of humor and make him work for us?" Krzysztof Turowski, the creator of an ad on the bureau's Web site, said in a telephone interview from Warsaw.

"We picked someone handsome and clean with a sexy look in his eyes - to get the French to come to our beautiful country."

Next week the tourist office will offer Paris a firsthand look at Piotr Adamski, the 21-year-old model, who will also pose at the Eiffel Tower in the same green overalls and Stanley Kowalski T-shirt he wore in the ad.

Mr. Adamski has become such an overnight sensation that even Poland's former president, Lech Walesa, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Solidarity labor movement, offered him advice for his Paris trip.

"I suggest that he ask the French why the heck for so many years they encouraged Poles to build capitalism when as it turns out they are Communists themselves," Mr. Walesa, an electrician by trade, said in an interview published Friday in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza. He added, "Piotr probably won't have the chance to say this, so he should at least publicize Poland well in Paris."

The ad campaign blends humor with a more serious message. At a moment when France is suffering from an unemployment rate of more than 10 percent, and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin is waging what he calls a 100-day battle to combat it, it is an effort to assure the French that Polish workers have no intention of stealing their jobs.

Even if they wanted to, they could not. Under the treaty that allowed Poland and nine other countries to join the European Union last year, older members of the union can restrict access to their labor markets for up to seven years. Only Britain, Ireland and Sweden have allowed in workers from the new members.

But labor has always been one of Poland's most important exports. In a sense, the "Polish plumber" is much more than that, because in most cases he is also an electrician and sometimes even a mason, carpenter, painter and roofer as well

"It's ridiculous, truly bizarre to say Polish plumbers are dangerous for France," said Wieslaw Zieba, 55, who has worked in France as a plumber and electrician for 25 years. "Some of the things that have been said by political figures border on the xenophobic. This is a country that desperately needs more plumbers. But it's not a noble profession that everyone wants to follow. You have to clean up after flooding and unblock toilets."

Indeed, according to the French plumbing union, there is a shortage of 6,000 plumbers, and there are only about 150 Polish plumbers in France.

When Mr. Zieba first came to Paris, he said, he had no friends, knew no French and slept in the Metro. He now has dual Polish-French citizenship and runs a thriving business that also does masonry, carpentry, plumbing and electrical work.

But the fear of cheap imported labor in France is so profound that it has dominated the discourse about the troubled French economy.

The term "Polish plumber" was coined in March by Philippe de Villiers, the head of the right-wing Movement for France party, in response to a European Union proposal known as the Bolkestein directive, which would make it easier for workers to live in other member countries and receive the same salaries and benefits as if they had never left home.

The thinking behind the directive was that if goods could move freely across the borders of European Union countries, why not services?

The directive "will permit a Polish plumber to come to work in France with a salary and social protection of his country of origin," Mr. de Villiers said. He also expressed worries about the "Latvian mason" and the "Estonian gardener."

At a news conference in April, Frits Bolkestein, a former Dutch member of the European Commission, used the term himself, saying he was looking forward to the arrival of "Polish plumbers to do work, because it is difficult to find an electrician or a plumber where I live in the north of France." He said he hoped that "Czech nannies" and "Slovenian accountants" would find work in France as well.

The next week, a band of rogue electricians from the state-owned utility EDF cut off the power supply to his country home in the village of Ramousies (population 248).

Opponents of the European Union constitution, meanwhile, urged voters to reject the document, arguing falsely that it would facilitate the invasion of the Polish plumber.

The issue became so serious that Poland's president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, brought it up during an official visit to France just days before the referendum. "I know that the argument about the Polish plumber is very often used, or exploited, in France, but I must tell you that this is really exaggerated," he said. "It's not true that low-wage workers from the new members of the European Union have flooded the other countries."

Meanwhile, Mr. Adamski, the model, is getting used to his newfound fame, boasting that he spent several days installing the hot and cold water faucets in his Warsaw apartment. "I'm very pleased to be the postcard for my country," he said in a telephone interview from Warsaw.

But for a real-life Polish plumber like Mr. Zieba, who is 5 feet 4, wears old jeans and hides his belly under a multipocketed work vest, plumbers just do not look like that. Mr. Zieba noted that in the ad, Mr. Adamski is carrying the wrong cutter for the plastic and metal pipes he is holding.

"He's too lacquered, too handsome and too clean to be on a work site," Mr. Zieba said of Mr. Adamski. "He looks like something out of an X-rated fantasy film about women who are waiting for the plumber to come."
But then, he added, "I wasn't so bad when I was his age."
Helene Fouquet contributed reporting for this article.