These days, he is paid 40 percent more as a technician at one of the world's most modern automobile plants, a robot-filled, $1.8 billion facility that will churn out 300,000 cars next year on sprawling farmland 40 miles east of Prague.

Preucil is living a new reality taking hold in the former Soviet-bloc countries. While France, Germany and their Western neighbors have been squabbling over the future of the gold-plated vacation and benefits package that helps compose the European social model, Eastern Europe quietly has become one of the world's fastest-growing centers of automobile and other skilled manufacturing.

Drawn by low wages, tax concessions and motivated, flexible workers, companies have been pouring billions into cutting-edge plants in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland. And it is not just cars and car parts: The East is also becoming a mecca for electronics manufacturing, with several new flat-screen-television factories either just opened or being planned.

Given lower transportation costs and lack of tariffs within the European Union, cars, televisions and certain other goods to be sold in Europe are cheaper to make in Eastern Europe than in China, an October study by research firm the Economist Intelligence Unit concluded.

Though not wholly embraced by local residents, these new factories promise to further ramp up living standards in the Iron Curtain countries, where incomes per person have soared compared with when the Berlin Wall fell, in 1989, but are still half those in the richest countries.

For Western Europe, the rapid advances present both promise and peril: A richer East means a growing market in which to sell goods and services; on the other hand, jobs are flying eastward. For this reason, the decision to admit 10 Eastern European countries to the European Union in May 2004 remains controversial.

It is not only that wages in Eastern Europe are 20 percent of those in the West, but that people in the eastern countries also work more. Czech workers put in an average of 1,980 hours in 2002, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, compared with 1,444 hours for German workers. And they work with fewer government restrictions.

"Eastern Europe is providing that nice healthy tension in the system for goods and services that requires everybody to be competitive," said Richard Spitzer, global automotive industry managing partner for consulting firm Accenture Ltd.

According to the European Union, Europe's automotive industry employed about 2 million people in 2002, with spin-off jobs bringing the total to 12 million. Eastern European auto jobs accounted for only 10 percent of that total, but analysts say that mix will change because the vast majority of new plants from now on will be built in the East.

It is already happening: Germany lost 12,136 automobile-industry jobs in the last quarter of 2004 alone, according to the monthly newsletter European Restructuring Monitor, which tracks layoffs and hiring across Europe. General Motors Corp., for example, has announced job cuts of 10,000 by 2008 at two plants in Germany, but analysts expect it to hire thousands of people at its factories in Poland.

The first wave of auto investment in the East came when old Communist factories were revamped in the 1990s. Since 1995, automakers and suppliers have invested more than $24 billion into plants in Eastern Europe, BusinessWeek magazine reported this year. And auto production in the East has grown 27 percent in the past five years, according to J.D. Power-LMC, a market research group.

These developments have pressured unions in Western Europe to make once-unimaginable concessions, such as freezing wages or working weekends without overtime pay. And the migration of jobs eastward has caused some French and German politicians to denounce the lower corporate tax rates of the new E.U. members.

The Kolin factory began production in February, and it now employs 3,024 people in three shifts. It is a joint venture between Toyota Motor Corp. and PSA Peugeot Citroen S.A. that builds three variations of the same small-car model, mainly for sale in Western Europe.

The companies got about $120 million worth of incentives from the Czech government to build the factory, including a 10-year tax abatement and training subsidies -- a fairly typical deal even by U.S. standards.

Other major players in the East include Volkswagen AG, which says its new Bratislava, Slovakia, factory is its most profitable worldwide, and Hyundai Motor Co., which has announced plans for a $1.2 billion Czech factory.

Toyota runs the Kolin plant, and, when it opened, company officials called it Toyota's most advanced facility, with the latest just-in-time systems and high-tech robots. Dozens of workers were sent to live in Japan for weeks or months of training.

"People work so hard here compared with other countries," said Satoshi Takae, the joint venture's president, who also helped launch the Toyota factory near Lexington, Ky., in 1988. "They have different rules about work here. There is no 35-hour workweek, as in France."

Labor accounts for only about 10 percent of the cost of making a car at the Kolin factory, and wages of $6 to $7 per hour, before social-insurance taxes, are far below the average of $29 an hour in Western Europe.

The Japanese managers were dismayed to learn, however, that, under Czech law, workers can call in sick and collect government benefits without telling their employer what is wrong with them. That points up an oft-overlooked truism: Many Eastern Europeans expect a level of worker protection that seems odd to Americans and Japanese, just as Western Europeans do.

"That is a pretty difficult situation," Takae said, adding that average length of sick leave per worker in the Czech Republic is 35 days a year. "The people are not bad. The system is like that, so everybody thinks this is the correct way. We are considering a bonus system of awarding extra money in case of good attendance."

At the same time, many Kolin residents feel that the factory has not proved the boon they thought it might. Wages are low even by Czech standards, they say, so most of the workers come from poorer areas of the country. Government-sponsored apartments have not been built fast enough, so workers live in dormitories.

Company officials complained in response that Kolin businesses have failed to take advantage of opportunities by, for example, bidding on contracts to supply the workers' cafeteria, or by building hotels to accommodate the many visitors to the factory.

Jan Prochazka, a local businessman, said that although expectations might have been unrealistic, the car factory would eventually be good for Kolin, just as the auto industry as a whole will be good for Eastern Europe.

"What starts to happen as you get more and more plants going into these locations, competition starts to heat up the labor market," he said. "Wages go up. You start to see an equalization."

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