Cheap Staff Can Cost a Company Dearly: 69% of Foreign Workers Hired Through Agencies Have Encountered Opaque Pay Practices

Social survey: companies that choose a staffing provider solely on the lowest rate risk higher employee turnover and additional compliance risks

69% of foreigners with experience of working through employment agencies in Poland have personally encountered at least one opaque practice concerning how pay is determined or the form of employment. 57.8% of respondents have dealt with several such practices. This is the result of a survey by the Gremi Personal Analytical Center conducted among 600 foreign workers.

For Polish companies using temporary work and other forms of sourcing staff, these data have a direct economic impact. Competition between agencies for contracts often comes down to the offered rate per hour of work. An exceptionally low price presented to a client, however, does not necessarily mean a more efficient operating model.

If the price of a service is clearly below the market level, a fundamental question arises on the procurement side: where does this difference come from, once the employee's pay, mandatory contributions, taxes, administrative and recruitment costs and the provider's margin are taken into account?

The survey shows that workers themselves increasingly understand the mechanisms behind the rates on offer. 96.5% of respondents have personally encountered, or heard from coworkers about, at least one opaque practice concerning how pay is set.

The most frequently cited situations involved advertising a high net rate without clearly presenting the gross amount and the amount of ZUS (Polish Social Insurance Institution) contributions and taxes, making part of the pay dependent on conditional bonuses instead of a guaranteed portion of the salary, discrepancies between the declared and the actually settled number of hours, unexpected deductions, and the use of different forms of employment to increase the amount paid "take-home."

Gradually, this is changing workers' behavior.

A high rate still attracts candidates, yet 74.5% of respondents say that they now approach offers with clearly higher pay more cautiously. This trend is particularly visible among those who have worked in Poland for several years and already have experience of working with several agencies.

Among workers with at least three years of experience, 95.2% prefer transparent employment terms when choosing an offer, or are ready to consider a higher rate only after learning how it is calculated and being able to verify the documents.

For business, this means that an agency trying to win tenders solely with the lowest price for the client, while at the same time attracting workers primarily with the promise of high net pay, faces growing limitations. The more experienced the labor market becomes, the harder it is to retain a worker solely with an attractive figure shown in a job advertisement.

– For a company, the cost of staff is not limited to the rate visible on the agency's invoice. If a provider seeks savings by limiting the transparency of employment rules and settlements, the client may face high turnover, the need to run further recruitments, a drop in productivity and the need to quickly fill staff shortages. When choosing staffing services, it is therefore worth considering not only the price of one hour of work, but also how it was calculated – stress the analysts of the Gremi Personal Analytical Center.

There is also a second dimension to this problem: compliance. Entrusting the employment process to an agency does not mean that the company in which the workers actually perform the work remains entirely outside the scope of obligations and risks related to temporary staff.

In the Polish temporary work model, the user employer assigns tasks to the worker and supervises their performance. Certain obligations also rest on it, including those concerning occupational health and safety (BHP) and recording working time. At the same time, the user employer and the temporary work agency are required to exchange the information necessary to determine pay correctly. For breaching certain obligations, a user employer may face a fine of PLN 1,000 to PLN 30,000.

Since 1 June 2025, stricter rules on the illegal entrustment of work to foreigners have also been in force in Poland. A breach of these regulations may result in a fine of PLN 3,000 to PLN 50,000, and for some violations the amount of the sanction depends on the number of workers. The rules also provide for liability for using the work of foreigners referred by an entity not authorized to operate as an employment agency.

Providing temporary work services also requires an appropriate entry in the National Register of Employment Agencies (KRAZ).

A separate risk arises with models presented as outsourcing, where in practice the way work is organized and the actual management of workers remain unchanged. ZUS points out that the formal takeover of employees by an external entity does not always mean a real change of the contribution payer. As a result of an inspection, the obligation to pay the contributions due, together with interest, may be assigned to the entity that in reality continued to act as the employer.

The survey results are therefore important not only from the perspective of workers and employment agencies. They also show how the conditions under which companies use staff-sourcing services are changing.

For HR and procurement departments and operations directors, the price presented by an agency cannot be considered in isolation from the entire employment model. The more a provider's offer departs from the market costs of legal employment, the more important it becomes to verify the KRAZ entry, the structure of contracts, the rules for calculating pay and ZUS contributions, working time records, the legality of employing foreigners, and which entity actually organizes their work and manages the staff.

In a mature market, the advantage therefore goes not to the agency offering the lowest rate per hour of work, but to the provider that can show the client how the rate is calculated and document the compliance and stability of the chosen employment model.

About the survey

The social survey "Rates, Employment Models and Fear of Consequences" was conducted by the Gremi Personal Analytical Center among 600 foreigners aged at least 18 who currently work, or have worked in Poland within the last three years, through employment agencies or other intermediaries.

Citizens of Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Colombia, India, the Philippines, Nepal and Uzbekistan took part in the survey.

The survey was conducted using the CAWI method (online survey) on the basis of a standardized questionnaire of 27 questions, with controlled quotas for citizenship and experience of working through employment agencies.

The main analytical groups were distinguished by length of professional experience in Poland: up to three years and at least three years, and by the number of agencies through which the respondent had worked: one, two to four, and five or more.

Sample size: 600 respondents.

Survey period: 5–18 August 2026.

For a simple random sample of this size, the maximum theoretical estimation error is approximately ±4.0 percentage points at a 95% confidence level.