Our reader found an online advertisement for a company from the Bolesławiec area offering employment-placement services in Germany. The advertisement read more or less as follows: “Care for elderly people in Germany. Conversational German required.”
– The owner of the company promised me a definite job over the phone – the woman recounts her experience with the company. – I was supposed to care for an eighty-year-old woman near Dusseldorf, in western Germany. She was mobile and relatively independent, needing only help with dressing and running the household.
The reader paid 1,000 zlotys for the placement and received a fiscal receipt for that amount. On Sunday evening, she got into a van with six other women to travel to their place of work in Germany. The company owner accompanied them. The first surprise was that the other jobseekers did not know German at all.
– I had the opportunity to see that nobody checked their language skills, even though the advertisement stated that conversational German was required – the reader says. – The girls travelled with sheets of paper on which basic phrases had been printed. Along the way, they asked me what the difference was between “Guten Morgen” and “Guten Tag”. I spent 36 hours in the van. I travelled all over Germany; I was in the south, almost near Lake Constance, and in the northwest, on the Dutch border. It turned out that we never even went to the town whose name I do not remember, where I was supposed to care for an elderly German woman. The company owner had arranged work for only three, perhaps four people. When I asked her what would happen with my position, she brushed me off with a brief: “There isn’t one, the German refused” – the woman complains.
On Monday, it became clear that there was no work for three of the girls. At around 5:00 p.m., near the Dutch border, the company owner began negotiating with the women for whom she had not arranged positions in German households.
– The owner suggested that we spend another night, the second one, sleeping in the van – the reader recounts. – The woman told us that something might turn up on Tuesday. I knew she would try to push anything onto us, an unverified offer, and keep the 1,000 zlotys for the placement. Fortunately, the girls and I agreed that we would make our position clear: we wanted our money back and to return to Poland. That is what happened. Fortunately, the owner did not cause us any problems, but she insisted that it was not her fault, that dishonest Germans had cancelled the positions they had previously arranged with her. I heard something different when the woman was talking on the phone.
Sitting at the front of the van, the reader heard the company owner talking to various people, urgently looking for job offers.
– The phone conversations did not look promising – the reader says. – Nobody had any offer for her. I thought it was a good thing that the girls did not understand German, because if they had heard what was going on, their eyes would have bulged – the woman concludes her story.
When asked whether the story described had really happened, the company owner replied that it was a lie.
– I have never driven around Germany for 36 hours; that woman is lying – she told our journalist. – All the women for whom I arrange work are satisfied with it. If I drive women to Germany, I leave, for example, on Friday and return on Saturday. I repeat: what that woman is saying is a lie.
– I will say only this: I saw a situation in which the company owner arrived at a house in Germany where someone was needed to care for an elderly person in very serious condition and offered the women work at that very moment, saying: “Well, which of you ladies will dare to do it, which of you will stay?” I would not recommend this woman’s services, but everyone must decide for themselves.
The advertisement for employment placement in Germany can still be found in online classifieds today.
(information: ii)