In travailleur polonais en france today, Polish workers (alongside other Eastern European migrants) are in the centre of many strikes. In this article, Janine Ponty analyses their position in French society and debunks the myths that have been spread about them.

In the building sector and in agriculture (market-gardening and wine-growing), mainly in the Bouches-du-Rhone and Alsace regions, more and more Polish workers are employed at wages 80% below those authorized by law. This exploitation of labour has been going on for some time now. It is the result of a practice that is spreading fast:’secondment of employees’ offered to French companies by Polish firms which pretend to provide’services’, while in fact they are selling cheap labour.

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One example is the recent incident at Saint-Nazaire shipyards where 92 Polish electricians from the company Kliper went on strike because they had not been paid their wages since they arrived two months earlier. These were the wages of sub-contractors (not declared by the French employers), and these’seconded’ workers do not pay any contributions to the social insurance system in France.

In addition to this, the wages are so low that the Polish workers do not qualify for benefits and have little chance of becoming self-employed and thus independent of their employer. This situation has led to the emergence of a new form of illegality involving Polish workers, which is called ‘tax evasion’. This is the consequence of the fact that most of the companies that hire Poles do not declare them to the tax office.