Twenty-five workers were sacked from Chung Hong Electronics – a Chinese company producing TV motherboards for LG in Poland – on 10 July. The reason? They had taken part in a legal strike as part of a bid to improve their work conditions.

Under different circumstances such an event would have probably slipped under the radar, but two things have conspired to prevent this. First, Małgorzata Maciejewska, a member of Poland's Feminist ThinkTank, had been carrying out participant observation in the factory as part of her PhD research. She had already documented in detail the implications for the workforce of how factory production was run. Second, another feminist activist, Wanda Nowicka, had entered parliament several months earlier and had been appointed to the post of deputy speaker. Nowicka took the opportunity to call a press conference to highlight the cause of the sacked workers – most of the factory workers are young women. Politicians from opposition parties then took up the issue.

The sackings have taken on a symbolic significance, raising the question: if workers' rights have since been consigned to the dustbin of history, what has social change meant for the country where the union Solidarity once made history by winning independent union rights?

The Chung Hong factory was opened in 2007 in the Tarnobrzeg Special Economic Zone (SEZ) near Wrocław. This SEZ is overseen by the Agency for Industrial Development – the organisation set up to oversee privatisation in Poland in the early 1990s. There are 14 SEZs in Poland. The Polish government has wooed investors with the prospect of tax breaks, cheap land, EU tariff exemptions and direct grants. The availability of low-paid skilled labour is another big plus – the firm admits that in China, labour shortages and the enforcement of improved worker welfare is squeezing corporate margins.

The precise scale of the financial benefits from state to business in the SEZ is unknown, but the State Monitoring Agency has estimated it to be a minimum of 1.69bn zloty for the period 2007-10 – an amount equal to 22% of combined government and local authority spending on healthcare over the same period.

The Chung Hong case has revealed what government- and EU-sponsored development in Poland can look like in practice. Workers have been reported as earning €335-360 a month before tax – temporary workers as earning about €310 a month. They are bussed in from settlements up to 60km away, where there are no childcare facilities and no alternative jobs. Officially, they work an eight-hour day with a single 20-minute break for lunch, but are usually required to do overtime.

Like many others, the company operates a flexible working regime, meaning it relies on casual employment or so-called "junk contracts". The majority of workers are on a cycle of fixed-term contracts and after six months, when by law workers should be made permanent, they are typically fired and later rehired. This increases workers' disposability and limits their rights – people are easy to replace if they don't conform to employer demands. The spread of employment techniques such as this has made Poland the European leader in the junk job field. Between 2000 and 2011, the percentage of employees on junk contracts soared from 5.8 to 26.9%, the highest in Europe and almost double the EU average.

The government has remained audibly silent on the Chung Hong events. It has also refused to consider recent proposals for increased labour inspectorate powers. The liberal mainstream press has attempted to neutralise the story by labelling the researcher involved in revealing Chung Hong's employment practices "a lefty, a feminist and an anarchist". Meanwhile, the role of SEZ is expanding in Poland, and the government is actively pursuing its Go China programme in the hope of developing Poland-China economic links. To what extent is it hoped that the greater exploitability of Polish relative to Chinese labour will be an investment draw?

It is hard to resist the conclusion that behind the cliche of Poland's economic "success", lies a policy of plundering, rather than investing in, human resources. To the extent that this relies on denying freedom of association, the right to strike and other workers' rights, how are we to understand the historical significance of 1989?