- 3 days ago
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IKEA commissioned an independent study into its global refugee programmes
Poland served as a key case study
By The Immigrant Times
Former refugees working for IKEA in Europe: Edgar from Venezuela: "Helping refugees integrate is always a win-win. It brings diversity and different ways of seeing things. It can only be positive.” Yana from Ukraine: “I want to share something of myself and leave something behind that matters.” Abdi from Somalia: “Yes, we fled our countries, but we all bring our skills and motivation with us. In many ways, we are even more motivated than others.” (Photos and quotes: IKEA)
Introduction
August 2026: When, in February 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Poland responded with warmth, opening its borders to nearly one million Ukrainian refugees, who were integrated into public life, granted immediate legal status, and given access to healthcare and education.
However, this humanitarian open door stands in stark contrast to Warsaw’s response at its eastern border with Belarus, where Polish authorities fortified defences and forcibly turned away asylum seekers fleeing conflict and hardship in the Middle East and Africa.
This duality, offering solidarity to geographic and cultural neighbours while enforcing hardline perimeter controls against non-European migrants, highlights a profound tension in Poland’s approach to security, national identity, and human rights.
Now, an academic study of one company's refugee employment programme offers an insight into how IKEA operates in a country that has welcomed one refugee population and forcibly turned back another.
Poland is IKEA's largest European factory base, from which it supplies furniture to its retail outlets across the continent and beyond. But Poland is also a European Union country that has been reluctant to accept rules set out in the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum.
IKEA opens its books on its refugee programmes
In June 2026, researchers from the University of Sydney Business School, the University of Melbourne and the Stockholm School of Economics published Beyond Employment: Eight Years of Learning from Ingka Group's Refugee Inclusion Programme, a qualitative study commissioned and funded by Ingka Group, the largest IKEA franchisee.
The report draws on 57 interviews across 14 IKEA markets to assess Skills for Employment, the company's refugee training and hiring initiative launched at the 2019 Global Refugee Forum. Since then, the programme has supported more than 4,300 refugees across 26 countries; in the most recent financial year, 600 people completed it, with 143 moving into IKEA employment.
The researchers' brief was not to produce a promotional summary but to document what has worked, what has not, and why, an unusually candid form of corporate self-examination, assembled with independent academic oversight and ethics approval from the University of Sydney.
One of the eighteen market case studies the report documents concerns Poland, and it merits more detailed examination than the report itself provides, both because IKEA's presence in Poland is considerably larger and more complex than its handful of shops suggest, and because the Polish state's approach to refugees during the same period stands in sharp contrast to the company's.
The report's own justification for corporate involvement in refugee employment rests on two claims: that large employers have the training infrastructure and stable employment pathways to support refugee integration at a scale governments and NGOs cannot match alone, and that employers are comparatively well placed to counter public scepticism about refugees, given persistently low public trust in institutions generally.
The scale of the underlying problem is considerable; the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) recorded 42.5 million refugees among 117.3 million forcibly displaced people worldwide as of June 2025, and public sentiment is genuinely mixed. A 2025 IPSOS survey across 29 countries found that while two-thirds of respondents supported the right to seek refuge, roughly half also believed borders should be closed to refugees entirely, and most had taken no supportive action towards refugees in the preceding year.
What distinguishes Ingka's programme from comparable pledges by other large employers is not obviously its scale; Starbucks, for instance, reports having hired more than 5,500 refugees since 2017, a larger cumulative figure than Ingka's. The more meaningful difference is documentation: Ingka commissioned an external academic team, gave researchers access to internal data and staff at all levels, and published the resulting account of failures and unresolved problems alongside the successes.
The report is candid, for example, in noting that the programme has not been implemented at all in some markets, that shared metrics for measuring return on investment still do not exist, and that funding pressures are mounting as initial public grants diminish. Few corporate refugee-hiring pledges are audited this openly.
IKEA tailors refugee programmes to market circumstances
Poland's media-monitoring and language-reform approach is only one of several distinct strategies the report documents, and it is worth noting briefly how differently the programme has taken shape elsewhere before turning to Poland in detail.
In Spain, Ingka built a formal recruitment pipeline directly with the state: its Refugee Talent Pool, run jointly with the Spanish Ministry of Inclusion and Migration, sees the Ministry refer around fifteen refugee candidates nationally every two months, with NGO partners helping applicants prepare before IKEA's own human resources (HR) teams screen and place them.
In France, the constraint was logistical rather than political: many stores were too small individually to meet the minimum cohort size for a funded training class, so IKEA partnered with the NGO Each One to run shared training programmes jointly with other large retailers, including Leroy Merlin and Saint-Gobain, with each company committing in advance to hire a share of the eventual graduates.
Across all fourteen markets studied, the report identifies five distinct implementation models in total, ranging from short internships of a few dozen hours to full, permanent employment with no internship phase at all, a reminder that Ingka's refugee programme is, in practice, fourteen fairly different national programmes operating under one shared strategy rather than a single uniform initiative. The Immigrant Times will publish a separate piece examining the French case in more detail.
IKEA in Poland: A modest retailer but a major manufacturer
To learn why Poland features prominently in Ingka's own account of the programme, it helps to understand what 'IKEA in Poland' actually means, because the company that runs the refugee programme and the company that gives Poland its outsized importance to the IKEA business are not, in a formal sense, the same company.
IKEA's retail stores are operated by Ingka Group under franchise from Inter IKEA Systems B.V., the Netherlands-based owner of the IKEA brand and concept, itself part of the separately owned Inter IKEA Group.
Ingka's Polish retail arm is comparatively modest: eleven stores, around 5,300 employees, and revenues of 6.27 billion zloty (roughly £1.25 billion) in the financial year ending August 2025. Ingka Group is the entity behind Skills for Employment, and the report's account of the country's refugee programme focuses on Ingka's Polish retail staff, not factory workers.
Poland's real significance to the wider IKEA business lies elsewhere, in manufacturing, which sits under Inter IKEA Group rather than Ingka. IKEA Industry, Inter IKEA's manufacturing arm, now operates fourteen factories across eight Polish locations, supplying roughly a fifth of IKEA's global production and as much as half of all its wooden furniture, making Poland the group's second-largest production country worldwide, after China.
Russia was once among IKEA's larger production bases, but Ingka and Inter IKEA fully divested their Russian factories, shopping centres and offices between 2022 and 2024 following the invasion of Ukraine, laying off around 10,000 staff in the process; no IKEA manufacturing has continued in Russia since. IKEA's relationship with Poland also predates its retail presence by three decades: the company placed its first order with a Polish factory for wooden chairs made in Radomsko in 1961, while Poland was still under communist rule.
Manufacturing facilities followed in 1992, a year after the first Polish IKEA store opened in 1991. The distinction matters for how this story should be read: Poland is disproportionately important to IKEA's global supply chain, which is run by one corporate entity, whereas the refugee programme this report documents is run by an entirely separate entity operating a comparatively small retail footprint. The two are connected only by a shared brand and a common founding history.
IKEA confronts negative framing of refugee stories in the Polish media
Within Ingka's Polish retail operation, the response documented in the Sydney-led report focuses less on hiring numbers than on a deliberate effort to shift media coverage of refugees. The report notes that public sympathy for Ukrainian refugees after Russia's 2022 invasion was initially strong but hardened over time amid what researchers describe as nationalist rhetoric and state-influenced media coverage, with hostility increasingly directed at more marginalised groups, including Poland's Roma community. IKEA Poland's own media monitoring found that roughly one in three news articles about refugees carried negative framing, and about one in four accompanying images evoked fear or disgust.
The company's response had two parts. It ran a sustained media-monitoring and journalist-engagement effort, reaching an estimated 150 journalists and editors with alternative framing and language. It also developed a 'Lexicon of Good Language', a glossary of respectful terminology produced with linguists and NGO partners.
Notably, IKEA chose not to distribute the Lexicon primarily through its own corporate channels, judging that direct corporate messaging on a politically charged subject carried reputational risk in a polarised environment. Instead, it was circulated mainly through NGOs and community organisations. It was also folded into internal staff training.
An internal gamified learning platform, used to raise staff awareness of the refugee programme more broadly, reportedly increased employee awareness from 36 to 73 per cent between two internal surveys.
This is a company inserting itself into a genuinely contested public debate over language and framing, the same debate The Immigrant Times navigates through its editorial decisions, while calculating that its own brand was better kept at arm's length from the argument.
Poland welcomes Ukrainian refugees but rejects most other refugees
By comparison, the Polish government's record on refugees over the same period is considerably harder to characterise as consistent. Poland has been one of the most significant hosts of Ukrainian refugees anywhere in Europe: 967,505 people from Ukraine held temporary protection status in Poland at the end of May 2026, second in absolute terms only to Germany's 1.28 million, but higher as a share of the national population; Poland's population is under half of Germany's.
Refugees and asylum seekers from outside Ukraine have received markedly different treatment. Since 2021, Belarus has directed migrants, mostly from the Middle East, Asia and Africa, towards its border with Poland, a practice the EU has characterised as a deliberate weaponisation of migration.
Poland responded with a border fence, a 60-kilometre exclusion zone along the frontier, and, from March 2025, a law allowing the government to suspend the right to claim asylum at the border for up to sixty days during declared emergencies.
The measure has been criticised by the UNHCR and by Poland's own human rights commissioner as incompatible with international and EU law. Human rights organisations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Oxfam, have documented violent pushbacks and phone confiscations, and a monitoring group recorded at least 87 deaths near the border between September 2021 and October 2024.
Poland recorded a record 15,197 asylum applications in 2024, with a sharp rise in claims from Ethiopian, Eritrean and Somali nationals, alongside those from Ukrainians. The government reports that the measures worked as intended: attempted crossings fell from over 30,000 in 2024 to just 158 in the first quarter of 2026, a 96 per cent decline. Poland has also declined to participate in the EU's Migration and Asylum Pact's redistribution obligations.
The contrast is not simply that Poland has been generous to Ukrainians and hostile to others, though the figures support that reading. It is that a private company operating a modest number of stores in Poland has, within its own institutional limits, tried to counteract exactly the kind of negative media framing that the state's policy now appears to assume and act on as the default public mood.
Sources and methodology
This article draws on Beyond Employment: Eight Years of Learning from Ingka Group's Refugee Inclusion Programme (Szkudlarek, B., Lee, E.S., Romani, L. and Du, Y., University of Sydney Business School, June 2026), commissioned and funded by Ingka Group and based on 57 interviews across 14 IKEA markets. Additional figures are drawn from UNHCR, Eurostat, Ingka Group and IKEA Industry corporate disclosures, and reporting from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and Notes from Poland on Polish border policy.
Terminology note
"Refugee" denotes a person formally recognised as unable to return home owing to persecution; "asylum seeker" denotes someone whose claim is still pending. Most Ukrainians in Poland hold the distinct, faster-granted "temporary protection" status rather than full refugee status.
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