Polish work gangs in Britain

From what looks like a very strong new (December 2005) issue of Prol Position (http://www.prol-position.net/), an ongoing German-based project investigating class composition through workers inquiry. (See also Kolinko: http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/engl/e_index.htm). This text (http://www.prol-position.net/nl/2005/04/meat) is an excellent and therefore enraging account of the techniques used to bleed the maximum possible absolute surplus value out of Polish food workers in Crewe. The way formal and informal coercion and scams are used to maintain absolute control of the workers' housing, transport, legal status etc and through these things to drain even more of their income back from them might feel vaguely familiar to anyone who's read, say, Upton Sinclair on tightening exploitation of successive waves of mostly East European migrants in the turn-of -the-(20th)-century Chicago meat packing industry. But anyone surprised that this is happening this way NOW has surely spent the last few years blindfolded. Of particular interest is the detail about what amounts to the systematic reversal of the traditional point of collective labour arrangements: subcontractors effectively buy blocks of cheap labour wholesale and manage the gangs' whole economic and social lives directly, with consequences so dire that respondents lamented the lack of an opportunity to try their luck with employers and immigration bureacracy on the individual basis prescribed by neoclassical economic orthodoxy.

This is the summary of a collectively revised discussion paper including fact briefing on the Crewe Polish migrant worker scandal and its possible solution, written by Martin Kraemer after helping out in translating between Crewe unionists and Polish migrant workers, June 2005

In the last months, T & G Union has evolved a campaign to unionise the workforce of a very aggressive convenience food company, Grampians Country Food Group. This group controls around 50 percent of the British Convenience food sector. It puts tough price pressure and logistic on suppliers and is itself submitted to significant pressure form the supermarket chains. It sticks to an aggressive anti-union policy. The plant at Winsford near Crewe in Cheshire with around five hundred manual workers was opened in autumn 2004. In the course of campaigning for independent trade union representation the T&G Union came across the preparative moves of what appears to be a massive operation aiming to replace contracted (mainly British workers) with temporary agency-driven staff from Eastern Europe, the Baltic Republics, Spain and Portugal, a clear majority of them originating from Poland. Within the last months entire factories have been cleaned of contracted workers and seem to be taken over by agency-controlled migrant labour.

According to T&G research a 300 workers Grampian plant is already operating on a Poles-only basis. The convenience food sector could actually head towards a curious situation of negative racism in its employment policy. Polish work gangs are organised in groups of 5 to 15, mainly around 9 people, often mixed male and female, which are mainly housed in one place and bussed to and out of work with minibuses operated by their agency. Every worker is stopped 12 pounds out of her or his net wages declared on the wage slip for transport. Such stoppage is seriously overpriced, illegal and most probably linked to tax fraud by the agency. Of this society, the workers see very little. They were clearly impressed to learn that British unions actually take an interest in them. Polish workers work much longer than their British workmates. They earn only half of the British manual workers’ wage of about 7 pounds an hour. The official minimum wage has risen to 4.85 pounds in October 2004 and to just a little over 5 pounds in 2005. However, the minimum wage only appears in a contract between the