Olkiluoto III migrant contract workers play a lot of cards, check out the Pori nightlife, and go fishing

The Poles don't like the steep prices; the French loathe the weather

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By Ville Juutilainen in Eurajoki
     
      The wind whips around the door in the quiet residential barracks area. A Polish labourer stands on the doorstep of his apartment and looks out at the flat Western Finland landscape from behind his undeniably impressive moustache.
      Adam Pulaniecki is a concrete reinforcing worker from Wloclawek, and he is in Finland to build the country’s fifth nuclear reactor.
     
”You speak German?”, he enquires, and he invites me in.
      Beside the bed in the small apartment is a fishing rod and a deck of cards. The map of the local area taped to the wall shows where it is not permitted to go swimming.
      On the TV mounted high on the wall, rapper 50 Cent is spitting out F-words by the dozen.
      Pulaniecki has been working on the power station site a few kilometres from here for the past three months. He says he enjoys it in Finland, even though he left behind his wife in Poland, along with his daughter, who is studying at university.
     
He works six days a week in three different shifts.
      His neighbour Piotr Gajewicz points out that migrant workers like them are kept away from home for long periods by the decent wages: for a two-week stint they can clear around EUR 1,200 in hand with overtime bonuses.
      “The money is better than in Poland, but a bottle of beer costs a euro”, grumbles Gajewicz, beer-bottle in hand. He has been here for six months.
      Like many of the Poles on the construction crews, he is another fisherman, but he also dips his feet in the local nightlife.
      Gajewicz knows to say that there’s a watering-hole in Rauma called Onnela, but that Pori - a slightly longer hike from Eurajoki - has better-looking women and a karaoke bar.
     
“The working day can stretch out to thirteen hours and life here is expensive, so in their free-time people can get a bit bored with just dealing cards”, says foreman Christian Winkelhake from Germany. Winkelhake, too, lives in the residential village that is littered with washing-lines and satellite dishes.
      He describes himself as a “mother figure” for the two dozen or so men in the concrete gang: he arranges flight tickets for them and organises training for new arrivals. The German firm has for instance recently brought in the first Iraqi labourers on the site.
      “They have been on our payroll for some long time, but the security clearance business took longer than usual in their case.”
     
Winkelhake notes that the construction site is almost certainly a good deal more safe than many in Germany.
      “Even the electircal wiring on the ground has been pulled straight, but of course there’s not much you can do about it if someone steps over the edge by mistake. If you fall here, you are going to fall a long way.”
      The case last month of an English worker who fell ten metres in the turbine plant on the site and died later in hospital is kept fresh in the mind by a sign at the site entrance warning of the dangers of falling.
      Winkelhake estimates that migrant workers probably spend around ten months in Finland on average. “When you’ve been away a long time you start to wonder a bit if it’s worth travelling for sixteen hours to see the family, when you are whacked out after a heavy stint of work.”
     
In their company, the employer pays for a week’s trip home when the employee might have put in as much as 180 hours on the job in the space of three weeks.
      After tax, the take-home pay is around EUR 3,000 a month.
     
“Half of them are satisfied with things, half are not”, is the comment from French electricians Antoine Testart and Aurélien Glockseisen, when asked about the mood of their countrymen in Finland.
      They point to the annoyances of having to spend a lot of the time in different stages of the work hanging around and waiting for security inspections. Glockseisen also complains that it can sometimes take “for ever” to get new tools they have ordered.
      Both of them describe the work as challenging, which is what you might expect when the job-description can involve working high up on a crane with the wind and the rain howling around you.
     
The Frenchmen describe the Finnish hosts as withdrawn and reserved, but as honest as the day is long.
      “Up here, you can leave your key in the door of the apartment by accident, and nobody will touch anything. In France if you made that sort of mistake, the place would be cleaned out in half an hour.”
     
The centre of Eurajoki is deserted on this chilly autumn day, but as evening wears on you can see men from Finland’s largest building site tramping to the shops and back, carrying their plastic bags saved from the Lidl in Rauma.
      “We’ve come here to build a new generation of nuclear power plants, a reactor that is supposed to be 100% perfect. There is no way work like this is going to be that much fun”, says Winkelhake.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 15.10.2007

More on this subject:
 FACTFILE: Poles form largest group of foreign workers

Previously in HS International Edition:
  The Merry Wives of Olkiluoto (12.12.2006)

Links:
  Olkiluoto (Wikipedia)
  Teollisuuden Voima Oy (TVO)

VILLE JUUTILAINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
ville.juutilainen@hs.fi