The Polish taxi market is paralyzed. The new regulations caused thousands of drivers to lose their jobs
The new regulations have paralyzed the taxi market in Poland, forcing passengers to wait longer for rides and putting companies such as Uber, Bolt and Free Now in a difficult operational situation.
New regulations on the taxi market resulted in a quarter of foreign drivers losing their jobs. Passengers must be patient.
Chaos on the Polish taxi market
From Monday, passengers must expect longer waiting times for taxis. All this is due to new regulations, which put thousands of drivers out of work almost overnight. This mainly applies to foreign drivers working with applications such as Bolt, Free Now and Uber, who constituted a significant part of these companies’ fleet.
An amendment to the Road Transport Act has entered into force, eliminating from the market drivers without a Polish driving license and those who stay in Poland for less than 185 days. The scale of chaos is enormous. Operators of platforms connecting passengers with drivers worked late into the night to exclude drivers who did not meet the new requirements from the system. As a result, Bolt lost over a quarter of its partners, and Free Now reduced its fleet by nearly 15%.
Since the introduction of the new regulations, Uber has lost almost 20%. their drivers. But this is just the beginning. “We expect this number to increase with each week of verification,” says Marcin Moczyróg, Uber’s general manager for Central and Eastern Europe.
Taxi is not the only sector that uses immigrant labor. Sectors such as the hotel industry, catering, construction and transport also experience an acute shortage of labor, which is confirmed by data from the report of the Polish Economic Institute “Poles about foreigners on the labor market – facts, myths, opinions”.
Immigrants save the labor market
Foreigners play a key role in filling vacancies on the Polish labor market, which loses approximately 100,000 jobs every year. employees due to unfavorable demographic changes. In the first quarter of this year, companies reported 112,000. vacancies that could not be filled – according to data from the Central Statistical Office.
According to ZUS, the number of foreigners legally working in Poland reached a new record in April, exceeding 1.14 million people – almost half more than in spring 2021. Although the majority, two-thirds, are Ukrainians, the number of workers from Asia and Latin America is growing rapidly.
