Five questions for five hundred thousand lek and two weeks of freedom

Anywhere else in the world, a job interview is the moment when two professionals sit down at a table to see whether their ambitions and values match. It is an exchange in which the company shows its vision and the employee shows their ability.

But in many corners of our labour market, that table takes on a different colour. When you go to an interview where the offer is five hundred thousand old lek a month for six days a week, and where annual leave is measured out with a dropper in just fourteen counted days, the conversation no longer has anything to do with management. It becomes a test of how low human dignity can be pushed for the sake of the month's rent.

Let me say it openly, without any bureaucratic decoration. When a financial offer keeps you at the edge of survival and asks you to give away your free time, it is not employment. It is a silent tax on people's despair.

If we had the courage to strip the false façade from these interviews and bring back the real questions hidden under the table, the conversation between owner and employee would have to look like this.

1. The wage and the impossible arithmetic

The owner tells you: "The wage is five hundred thousand old lek, but we are giving you the chance to grow together with the company."

The real question you should ask: "Have you ever worked out what it costs to pay for electricity, water, food and medicine in this country on five hundred thousand lek? How can I grow with the company when my mind is on how I will get to the end of the month without falling into debt?"

In Albania, the figure of five hundred thousand lek has become a kind of economic fiction. It is the sum set just high enough to say you are not unemployed, but not enough to live with dignity. And when you ask for an explanation, the old words come back: that this is what the market pays, that there is no money, that the business is struggling. Meanwhile, the luxury cars at the warehouse door are changed every two years.

2. Six days a week

The owner tells you: "We need total commitment; the hours are Monday to Saturday."

The real question you should ask: "Do you understand that you are not just buying my working hours, but my whole life? Where will I find time to see my family, to develop myself or simply to breathe, when my only day off is used just to wipe away the week's exhaustion?"

Working six days a week for five hundred thousand lek means giving up every right to a life outside the walls of work. It is a rhythm that breaks you physically and morally, made up only because the manager does not know how to organise the process and looks for the solution in the extra sweat of ordinary people, not in technology or efficiency.

3. Fourteen days of freedom

The owner tells you: "You get fourteen days of leave a year, as the law says."

The real question you should ask: "Why do you apply the law only when it comes to counting my few days of freedom, while for overtime, safety at work or respect for dignity, the law is forgotten?"

Fourteen days of leave a year are two weeks in which a person has to recover from three hundred and fifty days of stress, pressure and fatigue. And often even those fourteen days are granted on conditions, fought over, with phone calls that never stop and the guilt of leaving the work behind.

4. One-sided flexibility

The owner tells you: "You need to be ready to stay a little longer when it gets busy."

The real question you should ask: "Will this 'a little longer' be paid, or is it considered part of the five hundred thousand lek with which you think you have bought all of my time?"

In our corporate mindset, overtime has become an unwritten moral duty. When you leave on time, you are "lazy". When you ask to be paid for the hours worked after closing, you are "only in it for yourself". This is the illusion of control through guilt, in which the owner wants Western commitment on feudal working terms.

5. The empty future

The owner tells you: "There are excellent opportunities here for those who want to work."

The real question you should ask: "What exactly is the future of a person who works six days a week for this wage? Will I be able to buy a home, raise a child, or will I just be one more name on your staff turnover list?"

This is the question that frightens the most. Because its answer is clear to everyone. With five hundred thousand lek and a rhythm that grinds down the soul, the future does not exist. There is only survival from month to month, until the day the body gives out or you realise that life is slipping away for nothing between the shelves and desks of a place that gives you no chance.

I know that many people accept these terms because they have no other way. Poverty forces you to bow your head. But the real tragedy is not that the market is hard; the tragedy is when those who offer these terms sincerely believe they are doing this country a favour.

Until we understand that a person who works six days a week deserves to live with freedom, with time for their family and with a wage that does not humiliate them, we will keep seeing our airports full of young people leaving. And managers will keep asking themselves why they can no longer find people who want to work.