Thinking outside the box? Trade union organising strategies and Polish migrant workers in the UK

On the 1 May 2004 the EU witnessed its most challenging enlargement, with the accession of eight post-communist countries (known as the A8)1. Despite the EU’s espoused ‘fundamental freedom’ of labour mobility, the UK was only one of three countries to open up its labour market to entrants from the A8 economies2 Predictions in the UK, that the number of workers seeking jobs in the labour market from post-communist economies would only be modest, could not have been more wrong and attempts to establish accurate figures have been a source of vexation for both national and local government. All A8 workers who are employed in the UK have to register on the Worker Registration Scheme and Poles comprise 66 per cent of A8 migrants (Border and Immigration Agency, 2007). But this is a cumulative total and does not include those who are self-employed or indeed those who have just not registered. There is, however, a growing consensus that this Polish migration constitutes the largest single in-migration ever to the UK (Salt and Millar, 2006). As an interviewee commented ‘what is different with this migration is the scale and in particular the Poles’ (Senior officer TUC Organising Department).