[Sarina_Joy]

I've had a very different experience. For a town the size of mine there is quite a high number of Polish people working and living here. This rises dramatically in summer months when the tourists start flooding in.

The restaurant I work in employs 1 Polish girl at the moment out of 4 full time staff. Last summer we had 5 Poles out of about 17 full time staff. Last summer we employed several locals. Only 3 of them lasted the season, and of those 2 had worked for us on a seasonal or part time basis since they were at high school. The reason they didn't last was that that they were unreliable, often missing shifts without good reason, they were in general poor timekeepers and one of them was caught stealing from the till. (To be honest, all the locals who are honest reliable and are good workers already have full time jobs and aren't looking for seasonal positions). The flip side is the poles. Not one of them missed a shift all summer, they were always punctual, always well turned out and always worked hard. They were paid exactly the same as everyone else.

Everyone has different experiences but mine has certainly been good. They wanted to socialise with us as well, which was good, although they were very careful with their money. Obviously that is why they were here and I understand that, they were all students so wanted to save as much as possible. It's actually just a culture thing as they would all go into the pub and buy their drinks individually, whereas the idea of being in company and not offering someone else a drink or having some kind of rounds system is totally alien to me and I would feel embarassed to stand and buy my own drinks all night. Blah.


I've not heard of any local builders using Poles, most of them work in tourism, but then that's the main business here in the summer months. Given that fact, most of them will be earning minimum wage I imagine, so companies couldn't pay them less anyway.