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On January 8, the Education Workers' Union of the ZSP in Warsaw will make an informational action on precarity during a conference to be held at the Zacheta Art Gallery. The conference is sponsored by the Heinrich-Böll Foundation. Our comrades from the Education Union of the FAU Berlin are campaigning against the precarious working conditions at the Foundation. The aim of our action is to inform the public about this problem, showing solidarity with the workers, but also to raise awareness related to issues of precarity. Since the conference will have many feminist themes, we also will draw special attention to how women especially can suffer from lack of employment security, maternity leave and other essential benefits.

About the working conditions at Heinrich-Böll Foundation in Berlin, the Foundation has been using outside firms to contract workers. They do not earn the appropriate salaries for their jobs. They do not even earn the proposed minimum wage that the Green Party is promoting in their current election campaign. This is an essential fact, since the Foundation is affiliated with the Green Party.

In this way, the Foundation, instead of providing decent jobs to their workers, is promoting precarious working conditions. The outside firms impose very flexible working conditions on everybody. You are not guaranteed a minimum number of working hours, so sometimes they cut back your schedule for some period of time. They do not pay overtime for evening or weekend work, which people are also forced to do. And they do not even get the same guaranteed minimums as agency workers.

So the FAU members at the Foundation have began a campaign to demand that this use of the external firms be dropped and that people are hired directly by the Foundation. On decent working conditions, of course.

What's more, these demands concern not only those people working on the ”core business” of the Foundation, but they apply to all workers – period. So that means direct employment of the cleaners, receptionists, kitchen workers, etc.

We completely support the demands of the comrades in Berlin and would like to show our solidarity for this case. Everywhere we must realize the problems that such precarious employment is causing and organize ourselves to demand, at the very least, stable and decent working conditions.

The Heinrich-Böll Foundation, which is affiliated to the Greens, is able to obtain huge public funding. Most of its funding comes from the government – in other words, it lives off the taxpayer's money. The comrades at FAU ask “How can a foundation that claims to stand for justice, and is almost exclusively financed by public funds, so openly depress wages and worsen working conditions?”

We have no illusions about the difference between claiming to stand for justice and practicing it. But at the very least, we demand that the Foundation stop this hypocrisy. We warn that if it does not provide stable and decent working conditions, we will surely continue to publicize this disgraceful problem and encourage others to speak out in every place that the Foundation operates or is active is sponsoring events.

The ZSP has long shown that it does not tolerate precarious working conditions and exploitation is areas such as the 3rd Sector or in any so-called “socially conscious” enterprises. These are often just bad employers, able to convince some naïve or desperate people, (often young activists), that since they have a “cause” they are exempt from normal labor standards. But such explanations are not even to be considered in a Foundation with such a large budget.

The action will also be supported by comrades from the IT workers union of the ZSP, who have been active in fighting against the use of outside firms instead of direct employment.