New Strategies of Migrant Labour Movements

Despite the scale of migration of Poles into the UK (around 1 million people, as a rough estimate), there are only few studies that look at the migrants' political involvement and none regarding the migrants' involvement in labor issues. In the presentation I am looking at labor activism from the perspective of social movement studies, as majority of workplace-related initiatives of Polish migrants in the UK takes place outside of conventional trade unions and more often within radical and movement-connected trade unions (often with syndicalist heritage) or by migrant self-help networks that expand their scope of activism to labor issues. Despite the growing academic interest in issues of migration and migrants' involvement in politics, there are substantial gaps in scholarly literature on the topic. One of the issues is the relations between migrant communities and the organisational side of the host society, in other words, how migrants use the already existing tools - such as trade unions in this case - for their purposes, or rather they create their either by creating local chapters of organisations and initiatives from their home country or created in the host country. In my presentation there are two main findings: the first one is the realisation that the issue of dignity of the worker is the key factor for migrant workers, an issue that pushes some of the migrants towards social movement-like activism, rather than conventional trade union activism (perceived as focused on wages increase). The second finding is a typology of several strategies adopted by migrants when dealing with workplace-related issues.