On 16 January, we inaugurated our first 2025 Journal Club! For this session, we decided to follow up our discussion of temporary labour migration in agriculture with two articles: Górny and Kaczmarczyk (2020), ‘Temporary farmworkers and migration transition On a changing role of the agricultural sector in international labour migration to Poland’ and Matuszczyk (2024), ‘Towards a good employership? Phased strategies of Polish farmers employing seasonal migrant workers’.
Both articles deal with seasonal migration (mostly from Ukraine) to the Polish agricultural sector. The role of Poland as a destination country for migration remains a somewhat “new” subject, due to the long standing view of Poland as a country of origin for migration. The first article provides an overview of the situation of Ukrainian migrants in different sectors in Poland using quantitative data. The second article examines the ‘good employership’ practices of Polish farmers who employ seasonal migrant workers using an ethnographic approach.
In our discussion we focused on several interesting points for our own respective research. First of all, we discussed the interesting gender composition of seasonal migration to Poland, which ends up being more gender-balanced than other sectors such as construction or domestic work. Second, we reflected on the role of “remoteness” and how this should not be intended just as physical distance measured in kilometres, but also in terms of connection and ability for migrants to arrive and leave farms with their own means or public transport. Finally, we discussed the ever-present role of employer-provided accommodation in shaping the paths of temporary labour migration and its nature of both a perk and an added layer of vulnerability for labour migrants.