A Ukrainian refugee who worked as a carpenter in a furniture manufacturing company in central Lithuania says he has not received a single cent in four months and is owed roughly €5,600.
Volodymyr Tyshchenko, 70, told LRT that he began working for the company in Kėdainiai last August. For the first two months, things went smoothly, but then wages began to arrive late – and eventually stopped altogether.
“The excuses were always the same: an order fell through, the client didn’t pay, something didn’t work out,” he said. “This went on until March this year, including March.”
Tyshchenko worked for 15 years as a carpenter in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine. After Russia’s full-scale invasion, he fled to Lithuania with his two granddaughters. The family initially tried to settle in Kaunas, where Tyshchenko also faced wage issues with a different employer.
“We lived in Kaunas for two years until I lost that job,” he said. “I started looking again, but I’ll be 71 this summer – I realised I wouldn’t find work there. So we decided to move to a smaller town, hoping it would be easier to find something.”
Shortly after relocating to Kėdainiai, Tyshchenko found a job opening at a furniture company through the local employment service. He recalls that the salary listed in the job posting was higher than what he ended up signing for. His employer also proposed paying part of his wages in cash.
“I looked at him and said, ‘If that works for you, it works for me.’ I had no other choice – this was the last job I managed to get. So I agreed to everything,” Tyshchenko said. “He paid more or less on time for the first two or three months, but then stopped.”
According to Tyshchenko, the employer repeatedly claimed the company was facing financial difficulties and promised to pay the debt in instalments.
“But I don’t have any money at all,” he said. “We rent an apartment – the rent is €200, plus €150 for utilities. That’s €350 I need to pay upfront. Where am I supposed to get that money?”
Having received no pay, Tyshchenko quit the job at the end of March and is now unemployed. He returned to the employment service, but was told there were no job openings for him at the moment.
This is the second Lithuanian company that has failed to pay Tyshchenko as promised. He took the first employer in Kaunas to court and, although he technically won the case, he recovered only half of the wages owed.
Company cites financial hardship
The head of the Kėdainiai-based furniture company agreed to speak to LRT only anonymously. He admitted the company was struggling financially and said he had asked Tyshchenko to return to work, promising to pay the debt in parts.
“Everything was fine at first – we had work,” the manager said. “Then work dried up. We were juggling things, but it just kept getting harder. We could only afford to pay for electricity and fuel – there was nothing left for salaries.”
Irina Janukevičienė, who heads the labour dispute coordination division at Lithuania’s State Labor Inspectorate, said the agency receives around 10,000 complaints a year, most of them related to unpaid wages.
Usually, employers don’t pay because they simply don’t have the money, she said, but they cite all kinds of reasons. Sometimes they claim the employee caused damage to the company and that’s why they’re withholding pay.
She noted a growing number of complaints coming from citizens of non-EU countries, particularly from Belarus, Ukraine and Central Asian nations such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
“Last year, the number of complaints from these workers increased by 30%,” Janukevičienė said, adding that the majority come from the transportation sector, followed by construction. The average wage debt typically ranges from €4,000 to €5,000.
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