Narrating Migrant Workplace Experiences: Social Remittances to Poland as Knowledge of British Workplace Cultures

Abstract

This paper explores how the workplace experience of migrants helps to determine part of the social remittances they can make to their country of origin. The social remittance literature needs to pay more attention to work as an element of the migrant experience. Focus is placed on public internet forums related to newspapers in Poland because these are a very open means of communicating experience to the public sphere. To support the analysis, UK census and other data are used to show both the breadth of work done by Polish migrants in the UK and some of its peculiarities. This is then followed with a more qualitative analysis of selected comments from the gazeta.pl website. The complexities of both the range of migrants’ ideas about their work and also the analysis of internet-based newspaper com-ment sites as a form of public communication are shown.