Do widzenia Tomasz!

In Liverpool yesterday for a reps workshop with Community Involvement, and then a farewell dinner with Tomasz Laskowski and a couple of colleagues from the TUC.

Tomasz, who's an organiser with Polish union federation Solidarnosc, has been working with the North West TUC to help organise and represent newly arrived Polish workers in the UK. He's done a great job - and he'll be sorely missed - but we're hoping that his work over the last 3 months will help us build some closer links with Solidarnosc and underpin more work to provide support to a really vulnerable group of workers.

After 3 months of solid work I'm sure he'll be gald to get back to his family, so thanks Tomasz, and safe journey home!

Over 170,000 Polish workers have applied to work in the UK since Poland became part of the EU - and last week TGWU general secretary Tony Woodley wrote to the Polish Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz to ask him to support union efforts to stop unscrupulous employers exploiting Polish workers in the UK.

One of the things that the TUC and unions are keen to stress is that this is not a 'Little Englander' effort to stop Polish and other central and eastern European workers coming to the UK. Instead its an effort to stop employer's exploiting these workers and using them to undermine the pay, terms and conditions of UK workers.

A graphic illustration of this sort of abuse by employers and the agencies they use is the ongoing dispute at Irish Ferries - where the company effectively attempted to hijack their own ships in an attempt to replace UK crews with workers from Latvia (who were to be paid less than the Irish minimum wage), and to register its ships under the Cyprus flag.

You can follow this ongoing dispute at LabourStart, and read details of the Irish Congress's day of action in solidarity with the workers at Irish Ferries here.