Earlier this month a job advert was posted for factory workers in East Anglia insisting that they speak fluent Polish. Forza AW the cooked meat manufacturer who are a major supplier for Asda, claimed that it was necessary as all health and safety training was conducted in Polish.
Forza has been accused discrimination against British people and the advertisement is almost certainly illegal Under the 1976 Race Relations Act which states that 'unless there is a genuine need for a worker to speak a particular language it is against the law to require that they should do so as a condition of employing them.’
Polish workers are seen as not complaining as much as their British counterparts and being hard working for lower pay, but often they are mistreated and suffer verbal and even physical abuse and are made to work in unsafe conditions. Unscrupulous employers take advantage of this because often foreign workers won't express concerns for fear of the sack.
The Sunday Mail, who uncovered and investigated the advertisement, rang the employment agency OSR several times over the course of four days, and the requirement to be fluent speaking in Polish slowly receded to actually it's 'not too important now' after the jobs had been filled.
These kinds of negative press incidents can alienate migrant workers from the British people who see this as an injustice. But what the British people sometimes fail to realise is that it is NOT the Polish migrant workers fault that an employer has targeted them with the job advert, possibly with exploitation in mind, they just want to do an honest days work for a honest days pay.
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