Legal Employment – The Best Defense Against Invisible Enslavement
Forced labor is the most common form of exploitation among trafficking victims. On this International Day Against Trafficking in Persons, we ask: can legal employment become the strongest line of defense?
Will Poland Become a Destination Country for Human Trafficking?
Not long ago, such a question might have sounded like a grim joke. Today, it's a very real threat. Not because Poland is poor, unstable, or embroiled in conflict. Quite the opposite – we are an EU Member State with a growing economy and a chronic labor shortage. And as of June 1st, Poland has significantly tightened the rules for legal access to the labor market for foreigners – perhaps too much so.
As a result, in the absence of legal pathways to employment for third-country nationals, more and more desperate people are arriving in Poland not in pursuit of a better life, but only to face exploitation. They arrive illegally, through networks of intermediaries, fraudsters, and smugglers. They work in agriculture, construction, and care sectors – without contracts, without documents, under the control of a “guardian.” Their stories rarely make it into official statistics, because they are invisible – both to labor law and to society.
Not Only Sexual Exploitation
Public perception of human trafficking tends to focus on the plight of women forced into prostitution. In reality, most victims are subjected to forced labor or exploited through unlawful underpayment and excessive working hours. Other forms include forced begging, theft and petty crime, and economic slavery. A confiscated passport, withheld wages, confinement in barracks, threats, debt to a recruiter – not necessarily physical violence – are enough to turn a person in search of a better life into a victim of trafficking.
And it can happen next door – in your building, your neighborhood. Increasingly, it is happening here – not in “poor Asia” but in the heart of Europe. Trafficking victims often end up in the wealthiest countries.
Preventing Trafficking Through Legal Pathways
ELMI’s mission aligns with the principle of prevention by promoting legal forms of cross-border and intra-EU employment, and facilitating labor mobility within the framework of the freedom to provide services. Just as in medicine, prevention is better than cure. Fighting crime is the cure. Transparent and swift access to legal employment for foreigners is the preventive measure.
Every legal employment contract means one less person trapped in exploitative conditions. Every functioning legal pathway reduces the traffickers’ reach. Yet today, a declaration that a foreign worker employed in Poland will perform work elsewhere in the EU leads to rejection of the work permit application. Surely that was not the intention – Polish legislation shouldn’t obstruct Polish companies from offering services across the EU.
The title of the Government’s Migration Strategy – Regain Control, Ensure Security – notably omits the phrase “at all costs.” The goal of recent legal reforms was to speed up work permit issuance and the legalization of stay. In practice, however, obtaining a work permit is becoming increasingly difficult. Bureaucratic barriers will not stop migration – they will only drive it underground.
If we don’t want to be a country where people are exploited like commodities, we must build a system in which every person – especially those who come from afar – has the right to work with dignity.
Let’s not forget: this isn’t just about far-away victims. This is about our responsibility – here and now.
Legal Definitions of Human Trafficking
The Palermo Protocol (Art. 3(a))
“Trafficking in persons” shall mean the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation.
Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.
Polish Criminal Code (Article 115 §22)
The Polish legal definition closely mirrors the Palermo Protocol. Human trafficking is defined as the recruitment, transport, delivery, transfer, storage or receipt of a person using:
- Violence or unlawful threat
- Abduction
- Deception
- Misleading or exploiting a mistake or incapacity to understand one’s actions
- Abuse of dependency, a critical situation, or helplessness
- Providing or accepting material or personal benefits, or their promise, to a person having authority over another
– for the purpose of exploitation, even with the victim’s consent. This includes exploitation in prostitution, pornography, or other sexual abuse, forced labor or services, begging, slavery, or other practices degrading human dignity, as well as unlawful removal of cells, tissues, or organs.
If the victim is a minor, the act is considered human trafficking even without the use of the methods listed above.
The penalty is imprisonment from 3 to 20 years (Art. 189a §1 of the Polish Criminal Code).
The Numbers – and the Invisible Reality
Quantifying human trafficking is challenging. Data comes from the Police, the Prosecutor’s Office, Border Guard, National Intervention and Consultation Centre (KCIK), and NGOs such as PoMOC or La Strada. Each source reports different figures – enough to gauge the known scope of the issue, but not the actual scale.
In the past decade, the number of reported cases has risen. This could indicate a growing problem, improved law enforcement efficiency – or both. While we cannot know the total number of victims, the number of identified victims of human trafficking in Poland ranges from 100 to 250 annually.
Poland has traditionally been a transit country, to a lesser extent a country of origin, and least of all – a destination country. But with access to the most effective tool of prevention – legal employment – being increasingly restricted, and as labor shortages grow, the risk that Poland becomes a target country in the trafficking chain is very real.
Let’s hope we are wrong.
