I am writing this text at a time when the biggest celebration of the year is beginning in my city: the 32nd Bolesławiec Ceramic Festival. A five-day ceramics fair is taking place in the market square, during which ceramics companies—as they do every year—talk about record earnings. Although the owners and presidents of ceramics companies say the least about specific amounts, sometimes something slips out to the mayor, who is pleased with the festival’s popularity. He is also increasingly emphasizing that this festival is above all commercial.
In 2017, while summarizing the festival, the mayor revealed that one ceramics company had sold more than PLN 1 million worth of goods in five days. One of the presidents of a large company reportedly informed the mayor that on the very first day of the festival, sales had increased by 90 percent compared with the first day of the previous year’s fair. Small companies were allegedly boasting that during the festival they would sell goods equivalent to a year’s production.
In a July 2026 interview for Forbes, however, the presidents of the largest ceramics companies talk about difficulties, problems with employees, and rising costs. Arkadiusz Grzesikowski the president of Zakłady Ceramiczne Bolesławiec (ZCB), says plainly in the magazine that publishes billionaire rankings that he came to the company in 2024 to save it. “The situation was very difficult (…) losses reached 2 million.”
That is why I do not know whom to believe. None of the private companies makes its takings public, while the mayor likes to embellish and multiply the festival’s benefits. Perhaps he thinks that the more wonderfully he talks about the festival, the greater its political value will become?
I can, however, go to the Bolesławiec market square and see for myself how sales are going. It is crowded. Judging by what can be seen with the naked eye while standing in front of one of several dozen ceramic stalls, sales are impressive. More than 10 people are standing in line, and each of them spends between PLN 500 and PLN 1,000. A 220 ml cup with a saucer costs PLN 100 on average. Buy a set of six, add a milk jug and a sugar bowl, and PLN 1,000 disappears from your account. If you want to add a coffee or tea pot to the set, the price rises to PLN 1,500.
Because of working on this article, I cannot stop thinking about how much work goes into producing all the vessels that sell like hot cakes at the fair.
And on Saturday, “as a reward,” you go to work…
When one of the painters tells me she is going to work on Saturday, I understand the need for overtime. But when she adds that she is going “as a reward,” I open my eyes wide. My surprise makes the women laugh. They ask whether my boss does not reward me with Saturday work. I do not know what to say; I like my job and work unconventional hours, but…
“I’ll explain. On Friday I can work at full speed and suddenly I have 160 zlotys. But when I come to work on Saturday, I have 350 zlotys. And on Saturday I work calmly. It is also our policy that on Saturday, as a reward, in quotation marks, you go to work. You get better goods. For the same eight hours of work, besides the overtime premium, you can also count on getting better-paid items.”
“It is also a system of internally controlling employees so that they keep quiet. Because who does it depend on whether I come in on Saturday? The supervisor applies for it and the board makes the decision, although it is mainly the supervisor who checks whether the products for painting can technically be secured.”
“Special carts with goods to be painted are prepared for Saturday. You can earn a higher daily wage on them. In the past, only people who met the piecework quotas could come in on Saturday. Now (2026—the editor) they take everyone, even the slower ones.”
I ask ZCB president Arkadiusz Grzesiowski about working on Saturdays. I want to learn what it looks like from his perspective. He confirms that Saturday work is popular. From the statement I receive, I conclude that he is pleased by the employees’ willingness to work Saturdays because he associates it with the company’s prosperity.
With regard to overtime and Saturday work, it should be noted that recently it has indeed become more common. This is primarily the result of changes that followed ZCB’s restructuring, the rebuilding of its order portfolio, and a very dynamic increase in sales. In a relatively short time, the company faced the need to significantly increase production so that it could fulfill a growing number of orders on time.
In this situation, overtime provides our employees with an opportunity to earn additional money at higher hourly rates. Employees often declare their willingness to work overtime, which makes us very happy. Thus, such work, including on Saturdays, is one of the tools that allows us to flexibly increase production capacity and respond to current market demand. It should also be emphasized that additional production work is voluntary. The board is aware that overtime involves additional payroll costs. However, these costs cannot be assessed separately from their economic effects. If additional working hours allow the company to increase production, fulfill orders on time, reduce the risk of losing customers, and generate additional sales revenue, such a solution may be economically justified.
Every employee has their own “white collar”
The president looks at work from the perspective of impersonal figures, revenue, and costs. The women working at the company see it from the perspective of their own hands, time, and effort. They see something the management seems not to notice: the difference between them and those who supervise, organize, and monitor their work. They tell me about it, and I remember the hero of Heart of Darkness, who sailed down the Congo with five white entrepreneurs and had 30 Black cannibals to do the work.
“For every production employee there is one hump, meaning that every manual worker has to earn money for their own ‘white coat,’ because we know who earns the money: production.”
The women tell me what it is like to work in such a system. Each painting department has a master. Women have always held this position. Since 2025, the position of team leader has also been introduced. Several team leaders report to the master.“It is sick, because how much I earn each month depends not on my skills or abilities, but on the master’s mood.”
“The master could give you a bad cart, the kind with bad goods. Poorly paid. Then he would stand by the door and listen to us argue, laughing at it.”
“Painters who were the masters’ favorites could force them to exchange goods they did not like. And the master could take an unaccepted cart and give it to a less favored section to paint. What was most infuriating was that some masters—I am not saying all of them—were very indecisive.”
One of the women who had remained silent for a long time speaks up. She is a painter with a disability dismissed from ZCB. She worked at the company for 30 years. As I am told, she was one of the first employees dismissed for low productivity.
“The year 2024 was very unlucky for me; I could not keep up with the changes. I was not productive, they told me. I could not meet the new piecework quota. The quality checker (the person who checks the quality of painted vessels—the editor) rejected my work. Whatever I painted, I threw away. A piece-rate worker is very easy to dismiss. It is enough for a supervisor to tell the quality checker, ‘take a closer look at her.’ And she will simply hound that person. It is cruel. They do not pay us what they should. At the moment, they pay only for completing the decoration. We are not paid for taking and returning the goods. And they really did create a new painting department, so the route to the product has become much longer. The route to the toilet has too. We lose a lot of time walking. The price list in the painting department stayed unchanged for 10 years, while the quotas kept rising, creating a huge productivity gap. And we stopped meeting the quota. In 2025, 70% of the workforce did not meet the piecework quotas. Supposedly there was work, but it was impossible to earn a full day’s wage.”
“They prepare a comparison showing how much a given employee produced per hour during a given period, within a comparable group. But it depends heavily on what work you receive, so in our opinion there are no objective tools for measuring productivity. Especially since the piecework standards were never established. We have it in writing. How can they measure it reliably when every year, with a raise, they keep adding more pieces to be produced? It is obvious that my productivity in 2025 will be lower than in 2018, because people become weaker and grow older.”
Under a petition asking president Grzesiowski not to dismiss this employee, 181 people signed.
“Despite that, he dismissed me. I made an appointment with the president to discuss it, and on that day, at that meeting, I was given my notice. I went there in the heat of the moment, with emotions running high. I had been prepared to talk about something else entirely. The president listened to me. I will say this: he was very nice and very polite. I said I felt discriminated against, as if someone had pointed at me and said, ‘this woman has to be dismissed.’ He opened his eyes wide, so I added that I had no proof. Although his reaction was surprising. I wanted to receive the minutes of the meeting, which the HR employee prepared in my presence, but I was refused and told it was only a note. Well, people, then give me the note. I naively believed that the productivity issue could somehow be settled amicably, that I would manage. I would work my ass off. I would try. I cared. I have 30 years of work behind me. My father, sister, and even my son, who worked there for five years, worked in ceramics. So this company was always present in our home.”
“At the level of sociological analysis, this is an example of the erosion of a type of career known as an anchor career,” concludes
Zofia Smełka-Leszczyńska. “An anchor career means a narrow spectrum of positions and activities, usually limited to one company or trade. Employment is often connected with one workplace for an entire lifetime and can include multigenerational families. Employees with the longest service traditionally became irreplaceable masters, teachers for younger workers, and living encyclopedias of both the trade and the company. The logic of capitalism and the legacy of Taylorism, which measures the financial efficiency of every hand movement, often turns against these employees, accusing them of alleged inefficiency or confronting their mastery with the brutal variability of the quota: once 60 cups were enough, now 100 have to be made,” explains Smełka-Leszczynska. For management, productivity also appears to be a key issue. Here, however, the focus is more on raising it. Arkadiusz Grzesiowski tells me how he is trying to help the women in the painting department so that their productivity does not fall.
As part of the measures taken, the system for issuing semi-finished products for decoration was improved, including the preparation and transfer of boards with semi-finished products according to individual decorations. This made it possible to reduce the frequency of changing workstation setups, particularly when producing short runs, and thereby increase the efficiency of the decorators. An important element of the reorganization was also the creation of a separate painting department for completing series and orders, as well as individual orders. As a result, these tasks do not burden employees working under the task-bonus system and do not disrupt the fulfillment of basic production plans.
Pit bull, or “drawing abstract conclusions is unjustified”
The voice of the woman dismissed for lack of productivity conveys helplessness, complaint, and regret. The president’s help in improving productivity will no longer include her. She did not go to court.
“She saw the president after receiving her notice, and in my opinion he misled her by suggesting that he might not dismiss her if she increased her productivity. She tried very hard. Even the master gave her better goods, and she improved her productivity and quality, but they probably wanted to dismiss her. We only know that one year after her dismissal she would have entered the four-year period of protection before retirement. She tried, did not go to a lawyer, and the deadline for filing a claim passed.”
At ZCB, people can be dismissed for many reasons. And although productivity—or rather its absence—may be an understandable criterion, there are others as well. I wrote about these reasons in the article
“Zakłady Ceramiczne Bolesławiec. Fourth: Honor Your President and Board Member”. While working on this article, I came across another dismissal story. It is the story of a woman who allegedly called a board member a pit bull. She was dismissed after more than 20 years of work. The words she allegedly said to her colleagues, calling
Wojciech Huczyńskia pit bull and additionally criticizing the board’s work, were written down by someone and delivered to the president and the board member, who quoted them in the termination notice. The reason given for the termination was the loss of trust in the employee caused by violating the duty to care for the workplace’s welfare, observe the principles of social coexistence at work, and refrain from actions disrupting the order and organization of work. The case was brought before the labor court. It is ongoing.
Not only ZCB employees know that Wojciech Huczyński’s nickname is pit bull. Outside the company, the nickname is known as well. In Poland, pit bulls are considered an aggressive breed, and a permit to own such a dog must be issued by a village head, mayor, or city president. In the USA, they were used for fighting and were reportedly even set against bulls. However, their owners fight this stereotype. They call them nannies for children and argue that these energetic dogs are devoted to people, caring, and very patient. I therefore ask the president whether at ZCB it is standard practice to dismiss people for talking with colleagues. It turns out, however, that I asked the question incorrectly.
No. The mere fact that an employee talks with other employees is obviously not grounds for terminating an employment contract. The problem with this question is that it presents a very fragmentary, decontextualized picture and then uses it as the basis for formulating an untrue general claim about practices used throughout the company. It is also difficult to see the point of asking about a “standard practice of dismissing people for talking with other employees.” Conversations between employees are, after all, a natural part of every organization’s functioning. The question as worded therefore creates an untrue claim.
Regardless, we do not intend to discuss the details of individual employee cases publicly. We can only emphasize that drawing abstract conclusions about the standards in force throughout the company is unjustified.”
In Zofia Smełka-Leszczyńska’s book, I read a story about work at Ford plants in the United States in the 1940s, where contacts between employees were restricted. They were not allowed not only to talk, but also to hum or whistle.
Ford employee John Gallo was accused of delaying the movement of the assembly line by half a minute by smiling. The case went to court, which ruled that the impact of smiling on productivity could not be proven.
Can it be proven in a court in Bolesławiec that calling the boss
a pit bulland making several other barbed remarks about the board to female coworkers disrupted the order and organization of work at the ceramics plant? We will see.
The continuation is on August 24 at 6:00 p.m.
Next chapters: “In the labor court corridor,” “In the president’s office, where history, politics, and capitalism rule,” and “No one here works on a piece-rate basis.”
Part one:
Millions for cups, pennies for labor. The dark history of Bolesławiec ceramics