Migration as a way of life

Text: Ian Cook, Praha
Photographs: Jaga Jankowska, London

Radek teases and jokes with Bob. Feigning shock at his insults and pretending to kick at him, he fights not to let a grin appear on his face. Radek is the main Support Worker for Dave, another client at Shearer Court Ltd, who sits in the corner rocking backwards and forwards staring at the floor. Shirley smiles in the corner to herself and Steve eats an apple very slowly with a serious look deep in his vacant eyes. Amidst this confusion Radek appears at ease in the living room full of autistic men, schizophrenic women and other clients with various learning disabilities at the residential care home where he has worked for the last nine months.

Photo gallery

“We didn’t mind so much where we went to work. We just knew we wanted to go to an English speaking country and we knew we wanted to be together.” Radek says, whilst explaining how he and his girlfriend Markéta ended up in the British seaside town of Worthing, a magnet for retirement homes and home to a peaceful pebbly beach. It is his second job in England, his first job was caring for the elderly, and he is in the process of looking for his third. His relaxed features illuminate his carefree attitude to life, “I am really bored in my present job, I like it at times but it’s time for something new, so I have started to look for something else. I went to one interview, so far, but was unsuccessful, two more to come….”

Humans are experience-hungry animals. Our need for interaction, love and fun are part of what make us humans. We are complex; whilst a sheep may be happy lounging on the same piece of mountain, with unlimited grass and the same thirty friends for life, human beings yearn for more. Life is not grey; hierarchical politicians and certain streams of academia might want to view the world in monetary terms or they might want to reduce people’s desires and dreams into digestible and understandable chunks, but sometimes some people just want. As Radek says whilst talking of his future (maybe moving to Australia sometime next year), “Life is change.”

On a Road to Somewhere

What makes a happy 27 year old jump on a bus, leave behind his friends and family and take a job below his qualification level in a foreign land where he knows no-one in a town he knows nothing about?

Radek’s migration is not driven by economics, “Of course we earn more money than what we would back home, but it’s about more than just wages. I used to live with a Polish man when I first came here. He was always working and sending virtually all of his money back to his wife in Poland. He spent an hour arguing on the phone with her everyday. If I hated being here then I wouldn’t be here.”

Furthermore, Radek’s migration isn’t driven by tough conditions in Třemošná, the village 5 km north of Plzeň in the Czech Republic in which he grew up. He spent a little longer than he needed to graduate as an anthropologist, before enjoying his time picking fruit in New Zealand then touring South East Asia with fellow graduate Markéta. He will be going back to the Plzeň area eventually, “we’re going to use some of the money we’ve made to invest in a flat there before we leave to Australia… or Asia… or the US…”

Something New

“We’re here for the experience. We’re not here forever.” Radek muses whilst sitting on the beach in Worthing, the comparatively quiet town (when compared to the bustling student life of Plzeň) which he has chosen as his new home. This temporary mindset allows him and Markéta to take on jobs which they could not stomach long-term, for instance their first job in a soulless private care home for the elderly, which charged its residents around 1,200 Euros per month for its services. Many of the pensioners had sold their homes to pay for their stay, “It was a business,’ Markéta recalls, “There were people who could hardly hold a pen being made to sign cheques to pay for their care before they died.”

“We knew what was the ‘right’ thing to do with the residents, but the management did not care. For example it was essential that you found out the needs of clients, but we had people working with us who couldn’t speak English.” Radek continues, “Some of the residents developed swallowing problems in their old age, they were meant to be given special food but instead were given tough, cheap meat.”

They had found the job on-line, through a Prague-based agent for the British Care Company; it was a useful vehicle for Radek to come to the island as he then knew he would have employment when he arrived. Markéta was kept behind with a troublesome appendix but followed in the same way soon, an internal organ lighter. They were originally bound by contracts which kept them in the job for a year (though they later discovered that this clause was illegal), so when there was an unannounced (and unexplained) company-wide resigning of contracts without the clause, the pair handed in their required month’s notice and started to look elsewhere.

Itchy Feet

Whilst for those with a permanently-mobile outlook it is easy to walk away from jobs, this attitude does have its implications for wider society. It makes people less likely to fight for improved conditions in their workplace as it is much easier to work somewhere new than to struggle for improvements. Sean Bamford, a policy adviser for Britain’s Trade Union Congress, admits that whilst some migrants are the most densely unionised workers in the country (such as Afro-Caribbean women ) “when people think they are only going to be in the country for a short time, even if this is not in reality what happens, it is hard to get them to commit to many things – and this of course includes joining a union.”

Radek is like thousands of young educated CEE Europeans: nothing keeping them at home, so they move. They will not be working in the low-paid sector all of their lives, the job is a means of exploration. Radek doesn’t want to stay in this sector forever, “I don’t really want to embark on years of training to get qualified. There is no point unless I want to make a career in this field. Why should I put in all the effort of getting a NVQ , which I need if I would become a house manager like the boss wants, if I know I’m not going to stay?”

But for the moment, as one of the 11, 150 Czechs working in the care sector in the UK, they do their job more than adequately. “A friend of ours from University, Milan, had recommended us to try fruit picking in New Zealand and so we in turn recommended this job to him when our boss Nigel told us he wanted to employ some of our Czech friends. Milan’s girlfriend will join us later this year too.” But Nigel still wanted more Czechs, so they recommended him some Czechs they met in a Worthing pub who were working under awful conditions as au pairs in a close-by village. But Nigel is still Czech-hungry and is currently inquiring how best to recruit them. Young, in the large part highly qualified and enthusiastic workers from Central and Eastern Europe have been coming to Britain in large numbers. Indeed, of the estimated 600,000 workers to have come to the UK since EU expansion in 2004, 82% of them are aged between 18 and 34.

You Are Europe

With Czechs in Britain, the British in Spain, the Spanish in Italy and the Italians in Croatia we might witness, to the horror of nationalists and to the delight of EU advocates, the creation of a European identity. National myths were created with the help of mass media, but with no common language a common European identity is going to be created by individuals making friends, falling in love and being fascinated by other individuals. Maybe the European project can truly be about diversity rather than the dangerous ‘us and them’ mentality which came with the nation building of the 19th and 20th Centuries.

It is amazing still how little Europeans know about each other, “People we work with ask us whether we were badly affected by the war in our country, I’m guessing they don’t mean the Second World War, but think we’re Chechens or something. Or it might be that they confuse Czechoslovakia with Yugoslavia.” Laughs Milan, as the three lounge on the beach during a rare shared afternoon off. Images of Central and Eastern Europeans from ex-soviet countries as backwards or primitive could not be better exploded than by meeting Radek, Milan and Markéta. Just as those in the west learn about people from the east (including a client at the home where they work who can now greet people in Czech) so those from the east can learn about the people of Britain.

“I think we have quite different interests, but most of our colleagues are fun. They never have any money because they spend it all on drink and drugs, so the first weekend after payday they are already broke. They are entertaining though.” Radek laughs and Markéta agrees, “Some of them could be clients, this one guy is so hyperactive that he can’t get through a sentence sometimes without being distracted by a good looking girl walking past or something going on out of the window.”

Talkin’ bout my generation

This new found mobility has a generational dimension to it. The borders have opened but so have doors within young European heads. “For people of our parent’s generation leaving the country to work was an unbelievable idea. For us, today, it’s normal. My parents are visiting in a few weeks and I had to write a letter for my father saying ‘we are only here to visit our son, we are not here to work we will not stay in your country’ because he was scared he would get stopped by immigration control.”

“It’s a chance for young people so why not take it….” Ponders Mr Hornak, Radek’s father, “If Radek stayed away long-term, I would be disappointed as I like to have my family around. But I would respect, understand and support his decision. I would be happy with anything he chose and enjoyed. He is a grown man, he has always known what he wants and I support him….” Individuals can of course be controlled by states; whether it be the chains of hierarchical communism (which stopped the young of central-eastern Europe from moving for decades), or the limits the EU imposes on people who fall outside its borders (which force Moldovans to sneak across borders and work illegally under bad conditions) the human spirit can be and is controlled. However, with the dissolving of borders, at least within the Euro-State, new opportunities open up for people to explore themselves and others.

His father’s worries about travelling to visit Radek highlights his age, but it doesn’t stop him having the yearning for mobility, “Of course, the idea of going abroad is really attractive; unfortunately, I was born at the wrong time. If I was Radek’s age, I wouldn’t wait a second, but I’m not and I don’t know the language.” Whilst language may be seen as a barrier to some migrants, for many in this generation of Europeans, the language difficulties are not an obstacle but rather an opportunity to learn another language which can be especially popular when the language is English; the lingua franca of CEE, filling the void of Russian retreat and riding on the back of American imperialism. For instance, Radek and Markéta both attend a free EU-funded English language course at the local Northbrook College. When the autumn term starts after the summer break, they will work towards a nationally recognised certificate in reading, writing and speaking accredited by Trinity College London.

The ‘English for Speakers of Other Languages’ course is free for labour migrants, asylum seekers, refugees or those who are married to a UK citizen and is an initiative aimed at integration, but for those with a mobile mindset currently looking for another job, language ability may well prove the difference between a job picking mushrooms and picking a job they enjoy.

You Know Too Much

We are born free. Some people are constrained by their situation and so have to accept the life given to them. Some more dumbly accept the state and society’s shackles, whilst others, like Radek, have the position and the inclination to try something new. Of course, becoming mobile is not the only way to experience something more in life, there are as many different paths as there are variants in characters. Some choose mobility. They step outside their village, city, region or country not because they have to, not for their survival, not for their family’s welfare and not because of sheer desperation but because their eyes have been opened and the world is all too interesting to view from behind a TV screen, they want to taste touch and feel the world. If done responsibly and conscientiously, we could all benefit from greater mobility. After all, what’s the big deal about crossing a border nowadays?