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On October 5, ZSP held a picket at a Zabka convenience store at Malczewskiego St. 85 in Gdansk. A worker from that store was illegally employed and not paid all his money. The worker is a 17-year-old high school student who came to Poland from Ukraine due to the war and started work at 16 years old. He was working without a contract; only later, the Zabka agent drew one up. According to our calculations, he was owed 2600 zloties. In a discussion with the agent (owner of the store), she claimed that since she paid a fine imposed by the State Labor Inspectorate „what did we want”? Later she admitted that she owed the worker money, but claimed that the amount only totals 1655 zloties.

We asked the boss to pay the money to the worker. Instead, she refused to talk to us during the picket and hired a lawyer who tried to disturb the protest by acting agressively towards the picketers, filming them and screaming that we are „liars” and „have no proof”. (Except for the documents and the admission of the boss that she owes money, although less than we calculated.) We were quite shocked by the behaviour of somebody claiming to be a lawyer and on checking who she was, we were astounded to find out that for the last 20 years, she has been the Chairperson of an Anti-Mobbing Association, claiming to fight against mobbing in the workplace. It was even more astounding for this that this person was basically calling the victim of wage theft a liar in a public space but refused to even listen to a word that person had to say and completely ignored him.

After such an encounter, we think we will get some correspondence from the lawyer before we see any payment from the boss, who refuses to pay anything, although she admits owing money.

We are escalating this protest again to the central office of Zabka as we understand this agent wants to open a new Zabka store. Among the other problems, besides illegally employing people without contracts and not paying, it is not allowed to let underage people sell alcohol and cigarettes. We will be waiting for Zabka's reaction but as we already know, exploitation is more profitable for these little entrepreneurs who open Zabka franchises.

Zabka is owned by a large private equity firm called CVC Capital Partners. According to Wikipedia, it has 185 billion euros of assets under management and 157 billion euros in secured committments. This makes it one of the richest private equity firms in the world.

Zabka now runs over 10,000 stores in Poland. They are a franchise which is famous for allowing people to open with extremely low capital. Zabka also operates in the Czech Republic, but operations there were sold to Tesco.

CVC has issued an ITF (Intention to Float) meaning they would like to offer shares on the stock market. Initial reports estimated that these could be worth 8 billion dollars. So investors can get a chance to make money off the practices of wage theft so common across the country.

ZSP will continue to fight for the unpaid wages and draw public attention to these practices at this convenience store which is already becoming known as a place you would not want to work, unless you have little other choice.