Polish migrant women and workplace belonging

Blog post by William Shankley, University of Nottingham, UK

​Nearly twenty years have passed since the expansion of the European Union (EU) led to the significant movement of Polish citizens to the UK. Despite the UK's subsequent departure from the EU, Polish migration assumes a prominent place in the country's migrant diversity.
 
Belonging is a crucial aspect of migrants' lived experience in another country, and previous studies on Polish migrant belonging in the UK have primarily focused on the neighbourhood context as this is contested, resisted and reshaped. Additionally, the majority of existing research has predominantly concentrated on Polish migrants' belonging among those working in low-skilled industries, which was the dominant occupational position most Polish migrants entered into. Nonetheless, Polish migrants' entry into a range of workplaces after their migration offers an equally important site in which to examine their belonging. Furthermore, there has also been a lack of research into Polish migrants working in professional occupations and their belonging at work.

Polish migrants' experiences of belonging have been further complicated by the contextual frame in which they migrated to the UK, which has occurred against an intensification of anti-Polish and anti-Eastern European sentiment, particularly accompanying debates about the country's EU membership and its continued relationship with the system. Underpinning these sentiments have been negative representations of the migrants as unfair job competition but also fears of cultural threats posed by unrestricted immigration and the perceived access of migrants to the welfare state. Consequently, Polish migrants' belonging has been challenged based on their nationality but also by their position in the workplace.
 
Accordingly, my Identities article, ‘Fragile belonging: professional Polish women’s belonging at work’, draws on narrative interviews with fourteen Polish migrant women working in a range of professional occupations, including solicitors, accountants, and business managers, to examine their belonging. The sample also included interviews with eight Polish women working in various low-skilled industries to contrast these experiences and unpack the types of strategies these women used in their belonging work in their workplaces and whether these were confined to those working in specific occupations.
 
Using thematic analysis to examine the rich accounts provided by twenty-two Polish women, the article found that the women faced numerous encounters in their workplaces that challenged their sense of belonging, and these were often contextually embedded in the types of work they undertook. Their stories showed that the women's belonging was challenged based on not only their nationality but also on their gender and occupational position. These challenges occurred among a variety of audiences, including their customers, service users, clients, but also their colleagues.
 
Rather than passively accepting these challenges, many of these women explained how they implemented multiple active strategies to not only resist attempts to undermine their belonging but also made attempts to elevate their status to avoid contestation in the first place. The strategies they used were verbal and discursive and included mobilizing their shared whiteness and Europeanness, accentuating their professional or academic qualifications and work experience, and changing their names to discursively pass as coming from another nationality with a more favourable status. However, these strategies seemed to be confined to professional women mainly because of the cultural capital they possessed, as migrant women working in lower occupational positions were constrained by structural factors relating to their work. Many of them explained that they did not have the time outside of work to improve their language skills or engage in conversations with native British speakers, thus preventing them from undertaking similar belonging strategies.
 
My Identities articles provides insights into the belonging work professional Polish women undertake in their workplaces and offers critical information for policymakers looking to address non-belonging among migrant communities in contexts other than the neighbourhood.

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Image credit: Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash​

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Read the Identities article:
Shankley, William. (2023). Fragile belonging: professional Polish women’s belonging at work. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: ​10.1080/1070289X.2023.2218200   
OPEN ACCESS

Read further in Identities:

‘Paperwork or no paperwork, we are guests in this country’: mothering and belonging in the wake of the Windrush Scandal

Game of labels: identification of highly skilled migrants

Intimate citizenship: introduction to the special issue on citizenship, membership and belonging in mixed-status families   OPEN ACCESS