Mistake - or another cheat?

This won't be a funny post.

The next employer, even though the work itself is very nice and the atmosphere as well, seems to play same game with us as the previous one did with me.

Yesterday we got our first payment, for the first days we worked in Mistral. When I saw the cheques, I was very happy, because I knew that Krzysztof was out of the money. However, my smile dissolved after I saw the rate they are paying us.

3,00 EUR per hour.

For those who don't know, this is almost exactly the amount of money we can get in Poland for a work like that. And in Poland, everything is 50% cheaper. Then, the difference between working in Poland and Malta starts to look like that for me: I have to pay for plane tickets, I have to rent a flat, I have to pay for the food (which is worse than Polish, I can tell), and then I get paid the same money as in Poland?!

What is even worse, everybody except for us gets paid 4,00 EUR per hour.

I already chose a strategy to work this out with Mark (the head manager). I will tell him first, that there has been some kind of a mistake, and he typed 3,00 instead of 4,00. Naturally he will say this was not a mistake. Then I will seem astonished and I'll ask why. If he tells me that it's because we're Polish and he has to hide the expenses on us somehow, so the police don't sniff around, I'll speak to him differently. First I ask him if he thinks our work is worth less than the work done by Maltese. Naturally he has to say "no". Then I'll try to talk him into paying us the normal amount.

If he declines, I have a different option. How about signing a deal with us, that he pays us by the normal rate, and in revenge we keep the risk of paying a fee to the police? This seems reasonable to me. Of course the risk should be his, because it was his decision not to get work permits for us, but there has to be some solution for an unfair situation like this.

The whole situation makes me sick. I don't want to fight with those people because they have been very nice to us. Nor I don't want to blackmail the managers by saying I'll go to the police if they don't pay me normally. But again I have to be assertive. We can't be treated as slaves, or the same as they treat Black people on Malta.

I'm really starting to wonder why Malta got in the EU. The wage problems look more like in Africa than EU.