The crew that knew every beam: how we brought seconded steel erectors from Turkey

01 / Request

Nine hundred tonnes of steel and nine weeks to the first lorry

The main contractor's chief engineer unrolled the general arrangement drawing on the table: a factory building near Vinnytsia, a thirty-six-metre span, more than nine hundred tonnes of steel. The columns and trusses were being fabricated at the Turkish company's plant near Gebze, an hour's drive from Istanbul, and the first lorries were due to leave in eight weeks. Olena, who runs client projects at WORKIN, wrote the task down in one line: by the day the steel reaches the site, sixteen people capable of erecting this frame have to be there.

The contractor's own erectors were tied up on two other sites. The company's first thought was ordinary hiring: find people abroad, employ them directly and put them alongside the two Turkish engineers who were coming under the contract to supervise erection. It asked us to work out where the erectors could come from and how quickly. The steel set the deadline: every week between the first lorry and the first column pushed back everything due to be built after the frame.

Who is needed

Steel erectors and welders, 16 people

Project

Factory building with a Turkish-made steel frame

Deadline

First lorry of steel in nine weeks

Contractor's request

A plan for where to find the people and how to bring them

02 / Why Turkey

Hire new erectors or bring in the people who have built these frames before

We compared two routes on the same criteria we use to choose a country for any project: experience of exactly this work, the language for talking to the engineers, route length against the date of the first lorry, and reserves. The first route was recruitment through our partners in Uzbekistan or Kyrgyzstan. There are experienced erectors there, but finding and vetting them would take two or three weeks, and on site they would be learning an unfamiliar connection system from engineers who speak Turkish and English rather than Russian. Every conversation would go through an interpreter.

The second route lay within the Turkish company itself. Its own sixteen-strong erection crew has spent years putting up this plant's frames in Turkey and abroad, knows the marking on every member and the high-strength bolted connections, and shares a language with the engineers. Citizens of Turkey enter Ukraine without a visa, the visa-free route takes four to seven weeks on average, and the reserves sit on the company's own payroll.

We proposed the second route: the Turkish company extends its contract to cover erection and sends its own crew to site, while WORKIN handles permits, entry and housing. The contractor agreed the next day and the Turkish company three days later. Its first question was whether visa-free entry and Turkish employment contracts were not enough. They are not: visa-free entry gives the right to stay in Ukraine, not to work.

03 / Seconded workers

A Turkish company's people on a Ukrainian site: a separate category and a separate package

The Law on Employment of the Population lists several categories of foreigners who can be issued a work permit, and among them it names hired workers and seconded workers separately. The Turkish crew are seconded workers: they remain on the Turkish company's payroll under Turkish contracts, the company keeps paying their wages, and they are sent to Ukraine under a contract between the two companies. For seconded workers the law allows a permit of up to three years, and the employer may specify a shorter term.

We build the package in two parts. The first is common to everyone: the application, copies of the passport data pages with a certified translation, a colour photo and proof of payment. The second is the Turkish employer's documents: a contract between the companies showing that the Turkish side is sending its workers to this particular site, in which roles and for how long, and a letter for each crew member confirming employment with the company. So the first document we worked on was not the application but a supplementary agreement between the main contractor and the Turkish company: we gave both sides' lawyers a list of what it needed to show, from the site address to the duty to provide documents for any replacement on time.

04 / The crew

Sixteen conversations in a plant office near Gebze

Emre, our worker relations manager for Turkey, arrived at the plant near Gebze on the Thursday of week one. In the yard, trusses stencilled with white grid numbers were waiting to be loaded; in the office there were glasses of tea on the table and the crew list. It had been drawn up by Hakan, the erection manager: fifty-one years old, twenty-six of them spent on this plant's frames in Turkey, Georgia and Romania.

Emre spoke to each man separately, in Turkish. He checked the passport and its expiry date, asked when the person had joined the company and which projects he had worked on, and explained what would happen next. Murat, a forty-four-year-old erector from Konya, had one question: would the crew live together, because in twenty years he had got used to everyone sitting down at the same table in the evening. Serkan, a twenty-seven-year-old welder from Izmit, was going abroad for the first time. Erdal, an erector from Trabzon, had a passport expiring in four months, and he renewed it in week two: we took the details for the translation and the application from the new passport so that the permit would not need amending after issue.

Hakan also named two erectors as reserves, and the Turkish company prepared their documents alongside the crew's. By the end of the day everyone had an information sheet in Turkish: the site and housing addresses, who the employer is and who pays the wages, the permit term, what to put in the border folder, and why their stay is limited to ninety days in any hundred and eighty until they apply for a residence permit. At the bottom were Emre's and Olena's phone numbers.

05 / Employer documents

Sixteen letters on one template

Within two days the Turkish company's HR department sent what it had: scans of sixteen employment contracts from different years on different templates. Serkan's contract, signed when he joined as an apprentice six years ago, still gave his job as apprentice, and the three oldest contracts had no passport numbers. For the company this was an ordinary archive; for the package it was a set of documents that did not match the applications.

We did not ask the Turkish side to rewrite the contracts. Nataliia, our Head of Documents, and Emre drew up one letter template in Turkish and English: name in Latin script exactly as in the passport, passport number, current job title, date of hire, the reference of the contract between the companies, the site address and the secondment period. The letter is signed by the Turkish company's director and on its own confirms everything the package needs.

Documents issued abroad must be legalised unless an international treaty provides otherwise. Nataliia checked in advance which certification Turkish documents require and sent the Turkish side step-by-step instructions in the right order, so that nothing in Turkey had to be done twice. The certified letters reached Kyiv by courier in a single envelope at the end of week three.

06 / Translation

A one-page glossary for the translator

In Kyiv almost forty documents were waiting for the translator: passport page copies, the letters, the supplementary agreement in English and the two reserves' documents. Documents in a foreign language are translated into Ukrainian, and the translator's signature is notarised. A single translator did all of it: two people would have translated the same Turkish job title with two different words.

To leave no room for doubt even with one translator, Nataliia and Emre put together a one-page glossary. Each Turkish job title got exactly one Ukrainian equivalent: montaj şefi for the erection manager, çelik konstrüksiyon montajcısı for a steel structure erector, kaynakçı for a welder. The glossary also fixed both company names as they appear in their registers and the site address with the name of the local community. The same words then appeared in the applications, the translations, the information sheet and the deadline register. Nataliia checked the translations against the originals line by line, and the only slip, in a passport issue date, was corrected before the notary. How we handle translations for candidates we recruit ourselves is covered in the scenario on foreign documents at a machinery plant.

07 / Permits

Ten months to match the erection schedule, not three years just in case

The contractor wanted to apply for the maximum three years so as not to think about deadlines. We put the schedule and the fee formula side by side. Erecting the frame and roof would take seven months, and the fee depends on the term: up to and including six months, three subsistence minimums for able-bodied persons as of 1 January of the year of application; from six months to a year, five; from one to two years, eight; from two to three years, ten. Three years for seven months' work meant twice the fee for every worker.

We proposed ten months: seven for the schedule and three in reserve. If erection runs over, the permit can be extended: the application goes in no later than 20 and no earlier than 50 calendar days before expiry, and that window went straight into the register. The main contractor, as the Ukrainian party to the contract, filed sixteen applications through the employer's online account on the Thursday of week four. The law allows up to seven working days for a decision; it came on the fifth. The reserves' packages were kept ready to file the same day if a replacement was needed.

1. Week 1

   Decision to second the crew, conversations with the crew, information sheets.

2. Weeks 2-3

   Supplementary agreement, letters on one template, certification in Turkey.

3. Week 4

   Translations, checks, 16 applications filed.

4. Week 5

   Permits issued, housing and its documents checked.

5. Weeks 8-9

   Entry, registration and residence permits, the first lorry.

08 / Entry and housing

A border crossing at half past five and two houses with a big kitchen

We looked for housing with Murat's shared table in mind. Under living support we rented two neighbouring houses in a village twelve kilometres from the site, eight beds each, with a large kitchen and a laundry room. The owner gave written consent to registration of residence, and we had checked the documents for the houses back in week five.

On the Monday of week eight the crew, who had reached a neighbouring country the day before, crossed the land border on a coach we had booked. At 5:30 Emre was waiting on the Ukrainian side of the crossing. Each man's folder held his passport, a copy of the permit, the main contractor's letter with the site and housing addresses and proof of housing, and everyone gave the purpose of the trip as it was: construction work under a permit. Serkan, on his first trip abroad, answered the border officer exactly as Emre had rehearsed with the crew on a video call before departure. That evening Murat brewed tea for everyone in the big kitchen.

On Wednesday and Thursday the migration partner took the crew in two groups of eight through registration of residence and applications for temporary residence permits, with Emre going along with each group to interpret. The filing dates went into the register next to the permit and passport expiry dates.

09 / Summary

The crew at the gate on the day of the first lorry

At ten o'clock on the Tuesday of week nine the first lorry with columns drove on to the site, and Hakan's crew was already standing at the gate. The main contractor had a file for every worker: a copy of the permit, the Turkish employer's letter with its translation, a passport copy with its translation, confirmation of registration and the residence permit filing date. From there the Turkish company runs the erection, and we look after the crew's documents under migration support.

Approach

The Turkish company's own crew as seconded workers

Employer documents

16 letters on one template, certified in Turkey

Translations

One translator and one job title glossary

Permits

16 for ten months, decision on the fifth working day

Entry

Visa-free, a week before the first lorry

A foreign company's crew on a Ukrainian site is no reason to give up the people who know the job best: we find the lawful route for them and get them to site by the date the steel sets. In a seconded crew the Turkish company provides any replacement from its own reserves, and we obtain the new person's permit before he starts work; when we recruit the people ourselves, the WORKIN replacement guarantee applies for at least 6 months from the worker's first shift, provided the agreed working, pay and housing conditions are kept. A Turkish crew with bilingual leads is covered in the scenario on a facade crew, and checking crew files before site access in the scenario on a main contractor's site. The terms of our work are set out in the contract with WORKIN, and the whole route is on the How it works page. More on workers for construction and builders from abroad.

10 / FAQ

Questions and answers