True Left

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ukrainian-women-fleeing-war-welcome-162329555.html

VESZPREM, Hungary, March 9 (Reuters) - Two days after arriving from the bombarded outskirts of Kyiv following a gruelling journey, 24-year-old Ukrainian Olga Yasnopolska signed a contract to work for a large German automotive parts supplier in western Hungary.

Meanwhile, "non-white" refugees are frequently prohibited from getting jobs despite having been in a country for years.

Yasnopolska, who worked for the railways in Ukraine, said the job contract gave her some sense of security.

"It's a relief that we have somewhere to stay and now I have a job, and we are in safety," she said, with a tired, faint smile.

Translation: it's OK to be a "white" refugee.

She also hopes to find a job soon that will allow her to take care of her baby.

I am sure she will get one rather quickly. All the same people who deliberately make life miserable for "non-whites" will go out of their way to help her.

'UKRAINIAN-FRIENDLY JOBS'

In the wake of the European Union's 2015 migration crisis some eastern members, led by Poland and Hungary, refused to take in people fleeing war and poverty, saying an influx from Africa and the Middle East would threaten their Christian traditions.

But hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians had been working in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic even before the current exodus.

Since last year, companies across the manufacturing, information technology and construction sectors in the region have been jostling to attract employees as their economies rebounded fast from the COVID-19 induced slump.

Czech job vacancies climbed to a record high of nearly 364,000 in February. Romanian vacancies reached 45,600 in the fourth quarter of 2021, up by 10,000 in annual terms.

In Poland, which has been a top destination for Ukrainian workers for years and has received more than 1.3 million refugees since the war began, employers reported 116,500 job vacancies in February.

Work agencies and companies are now hoping to tap into the large pool of refugees, trying to arrange accommodation for Ukrainian workers' family members and their children.

None of which they did with "non-white" refugees.

"This 1 million women with children is in reality about half a million people who can actually enter the workforce and the Polish economy will be able to absorb them easily within a few, three or four months," said Krzysztof Inglot of the Employers of Poland Association.

You did not say this when the refugees were "non-white".

BestJobs, a Romanian recruitment platform with 32,000 open positions, has introduced a "Ukrainian friendly jobs" tag.

Jitka Souckova, marketing director of Grafton Recruitment in Prague, said there were many jobs in manufacturing or logistics, where Ukrainians could work even without speaking Czech.

Yet the frequently stated reason for not letting "non-white" refugees get jobs was because they were not fluent in the local language. Supposedly, a worker lacking fluency in the local language would endanger the other workers in case of fire hazards and other emergencies. What happened to all that?

Gabor Berta, head of the Man at Work temp agency office in Veszprem, through which Yasnopolska found her job, said the biggest problem was finding accommodation for all the Ukrainian workers they have placed and their families.

Meanwhile, many "non-white" refugees are still living in tents, and the camps are bulldozed once every few months.

"This situation is different," he said. "Here you cannot say to the Ukrainian employee that 'I am sorry I have too many workers now', or 'sorry we need to halt production, please can you go home'. Now, they cannot go home."

You say all of this just fine to "non-whites". The situation is certainly different when the refugees are "whites'.