COLUMN ONE : In Poland, Over the Hill at 35? : Employers favor twentysomethings and disdain older workers as leftovers from the Communist era. Young go-getters get a chance to enjoy the high life.

Six months without work has taught Ireneusz Gadzinski a cruel lesson about capitalism, Polish style.

Sucking on a cigarette over cookies and coffee at his kitchen table one recent morning, the onetime factory manager in this gritty Warsaw suburb cast desolate eyes toward the staircase.

“My hope for the future lies asleep upstairs,” he said. “I always have my son.”

Unemployed and 45 years old, Gadzinski can hope for little else in Poland’s new order. In a frenetic rush toward things new and Western, the country’s evolving capitalist system is unapologetically discarding most everything old and Eastern. For most Poles, that means that anyone older than 35 and weaned on Soviet-style communism is suddenly deemed dispensable, no longer valued by a rapidly shrinking state sector and rejected out of hand by an expanding but exacting business community.

The results have been personally devastating to workers and their families and have struck too at some fundamentals of Polish life.

“These people (older than 35) are used to ‘occupying positions’ rather than doing work,” said job recruiter Marek Cielcki, echoing the common belief that four decades of communism rendered many Poles incapable of hard work. “They do not have the drive and energy and are not flexible enough.”

Eager to cash in on the unexpected misfortune of their elders is a small but growing class of young go-getters, mostly urban twentysomethings who typically pay in rent what their parents take home in monthly wages. With a passion for new cars, travel, credit cards and Western European fashion, they are considered the future face of the Polish workplace--and a conspicuous and jarring symbol of the country’s newfound generation gap.

The contrasts with America, where the “Generation X” of twentysomethings bitterly bemoans its disenfranchisement by older baby boomers, can be extreme.

“It was a shock to me, but there is a big (young) yuppie culture here, yuppie bars and the whole thing,” said Dorota Dabrowska, 23, a Polish-American who moved to Warsaw after college and works as an accountant for a large multinational firm. “When there is high pressure and long hours, young Poles don’t flinch. The older people, at 4 o’clock they’re out of there.”

Perhaps nowhere is the youthful drive for success--and the accompanying clash of generations--more apparent than at Kamis Spices, a thriving import-export company that makes no secret of its disdain for the older set.

“Generally speaking, people over 35 would find it difficult to adapt to an energetic, developing firm like ours,” said Robert Kaminski, the 29-year-old company director whose streamlined office in an otherwise drab building features sleek black furniture, a towering tropical plant and Salvador Dali prints.

A college dropout, Kaminski earns about 10 times the average Polish salary, a sum so great he insists that he cannot find enough ways to spend it. His booming 3-year-old company, with annual sales of $5 million, is doubling its 100-person payroll, but Kaminski will not even consider hiring from among the pool of jobless who are older than 35.

“People lose their jobs these days, usually because of some personal failing,” the baby-faced executive said sternly. “Also, some of these people would feel uncomfortable in a company that is young and dynamic like ours.”

Private and government job agencies confirm that Poland’s flourishing private sector, where almost 60% of jobs now exist, has little interest in workers with more than five years’ experience under communism. Employers fear that the old system poisoned employees for good, making it simpler to train young, relatively inexperienced Poles in the basics of capitalism.

At the same time, state-run companies and newly privatized ones continue their struggle for profitability by shedding thousands of unproductive workers, with at least 90,000 new layoffs expected before year’s end.

Most of the unemployed are overwhelmed by their predicament, incapable of adjusting to the competitive new marketplace and usually lacking skills valued in the private sector. Unaccustomed to selling themselves to prospective employers, some have submitted resumes written on beer coasters, shown up late for interviews and demanded the same token workload that they were accustomed to under communism.

“This is my nightmare,” said Anna Kowalska, director of the regional labor office in Warsaw, where private firms are most aggressive in their quest for young blood. “During the socialist system, the employee basically dictated conditions to the employer. Today it is the other way around.”

In a country where there are no legal bars to age discrimination in employment, newspaper help-wanted advertisements accentuate the generation barrier, stating in large type that baby boomers and their elders need not apply. Many employers publish ads in English, a language so novel among most Poles--who during 40 years of communism were schooled in Russian--that even many thirtysomethings find themselves shut out.

“I am 32 and too old to find work,” one astonished jobless shopkeeper complained at a Warsaw unemployment office.

There are exceptions to the rule, particularly among high-level executive positions, where influential Communist-era managers of any age are courted because of their connections in the entrenched Polish bureaucracy and their knowledge of the country’s arcane distribution network.

Those fluent in English, German or French and with experience dealing with Western firms are also valued, especially if they have bookkeeping or computer skills.

But such employees account for only a fraction of the nearly 3 million jobless, about 1 million of whom are older than 35 and feared to be chronically unemployed.

Although most of the jobless are younger than the dreaded cutoff point, officials are less concerned about them because the expanding economy--the fastest-growing in Europe--has exhibited a strong interest in training and employing young workers. As first-generation capitalists, they are expected to maintain their work ethic even as they grow older.

Also, officials estimate that more than a third of the young unemployed are recent college and high school graduates who have chosen not to work, opting to collect generous unemployment benefits that rival many entry-level salaries.

Some also earn money on the side dabbling in the country’s prospering underground economy.

“For many young people, it is in fashion right now to be unemployed,” said Elzbieta Szymanska, who oversees job-retraining courses in the Warsaw area. “They apply for unemployment benefits with no intention of looking for work. Older people find this very demoralizing because they see the younger people benefiting from the system yet again.”

The abrupt turnabout in workplace fortunes, in a country where unemployment was unheard of four years ago, has strained relations between young and old and created a crisis of confidence among a generation of workers, whose self-esteem and job security were intricately interwoven under communism.

Many Poles, admittedly, did little more than show up for work under the former system, but most everyone had a job. In the old days, Kowalska, the regional labor director, worried constantly about finding enough employees to fill a recklessly expanding state payroll that was so bloated the country officially suffered from a worker shortage.

Today she has far more job-seekers than job offers, and her worries have turned to the toll that long unemployment lines are exacting on society. Although no statistics are available, those who work with the unemployed say there is abundant anecdotal evidence of drunkenness, suicide and depression, particularly among those unable to cope with a system that says it has no use for them.

A 36-year-old Warsaw bus driver, out of work for a year and facing mounting medical bills from a sick child, was so fed up with his predicament that he recently threatened to kill himself during a tearful visit to a job bank at the Solidarity trade union office.

“I understand we have to shift to a new economic system, but there is no social backup for these people,” said a shaken Jolanta Bryszewska, a job counselor who quieted the man and eventually found him temporary work operating a forklift. “What do you do with these people? Who is to say they are too old?”

Bryszewska, who peers over thick half-glasses and speaks in rapid-fire sentences, has opened her office as a refuge of last resort for the hopelessly unemployed. Her desk is cluttered with bright green files stuffed with job applications, each relating a tale of hardship with her notes scribbled in the margins.

She turned her attention one rainy afternoon to a 59-year-old man who came knocking at her door in his Sunday best--a tattered brown suit, undersized vest and wide print tie. He had just been turned away from a television assembly plant, which had advertised 15 openings but would accept no one older than 40.

Bryszewska comforted the distressed man but explained that his story was not unusual. As has become her ritual, she picked up the telephone and demanded an explanation from the company.

The company offered the standard account about the need for hard-working employees not encumbered by a slovenly past, but Bryszewska dismissed it as nonsense.

Although many older workers have had difficulties adapting to the faster pace of capitalism, she insisted that companies have seized upon the problem as an excuse to hire only young workers.

“It is easier to manipulate younger people than older people,” she said. “They sign temporary contracts and demand no benefits. The older workers know better, and won’t let themselves be taken advantage of.”

The result is that many parents sit idly at home, nursing vodka or arguing with each other, while their ambitious children play the job market, skipping from post to post and wondering aloud--sometimes cruelly and with uncharacteristic disrespect--about their parents’ shortcomings.

“This society is very much family oriented, so your position within the family plays a very important role in your self-image and identity,” Warsaw University sociologist Jadwiga Koralewicz said. “If the father is no longer earning money, that damages his position in the family and has a great effect on his psychological well-being.”

Jadwiga Rymska, 45, went months without visiting her recently married daughter because of the shame of facing her after being fired as a draftsman at a state-owned construction company. At home, her 22-year-old son accused her of being lazy--the only explanation for joblessness under communism--a sentiment he softened only after the parents of his college classmates began losing their jobs as well.

Fired in March, Rymska was immobilized for weeks, unable to control her fits of rage and despair as she was turned away from job after job because of her age. Ultimately, she said, she suffered a nervous breakdown.

“You can’t help but have resentment toward these young professionals who have all the opportunities,” Rymska complained after completing a job-retraining class, which she hopes will qualify her to open her own travel agency.

The Polish government is pumping more money into job retraining for older workers, but funds are short, particularly since large sums must be allocated for unemployment benefits.

Officials acknowledge that their efforts have been woefully inadequate, and they predict that things will only get worse as new graduates educated in Western-style business flood the job market over the next few years and make older workers even more irrelevant.

Back in Pruszkow, Ireneusz Gadzinski views his predicament with contempt. He had a good position at a small insulation factory, rising through the ranks in nine years. After being fired six months ago in a restructuring of the financially troubled plant, he has been able to find little more than menial work at a fraction of his old salary.

His 21-year-old son still has two more years of college but has easily found a job writing for the Solidarity trade union newspaper in Warsaw. Marcin Gadzinski buys his own clothing, pays most of his college expenses and occasionally contributes to the family food bill.

The English-speaking Marcin said he sees limitless opportunities in capitalist Poland but is pained by his father’s sudden career tumble and the stress it has placed on their family.

His mother, Zofia, has quit her job as an elementary school teacher and opened a private school in hopes of making more money. Her anger and frustration with her husband are hard to hide, he said.

“People like my father thought when they beat communism that they were the winners,” Marcin said. “Now they have lost their jobs and are unemployed. They won, but are not winners in fact.”

Clearly proud of his son, Ireneusz Gadzinski nonetheless feels a deep sense of betrayal.

A longtime member of the Solidarity trade union, he refused several times to join the Communist Party, even though membership would have furthered his career. Now, he protested, he is being cheated again--this time for being tied, by virtue of his age, to a Communist past he never fully embraced.

“We are a lost generation,” his wife said bitterly.