HAVING HELPED to bring down Poland's Communist Government in the 1980s, the trade union federation Solidarity is now taking on a new Goliath - the British retail giant Tesco.

A Polish archbishop has also backed strikes at Tesco superstores in Poland called by Solidarity, now somewhat reduced in size and under new leadership, in support of demands for the right not to work on Sundays.

"Refraining from Sunday work isn't only a religious duty - it's also a basic human right," said Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki of Poznan in western Poland. Preaching in Poznan Cathedral, he said that the state should guarantee the right to rest, adding that he believed that the Solidarity demands were "fully justified". All Tesco's 241 supermarkets and 21 petrol stations in Poland are open seven days a week, including Sundays and public holidays.

The church leader was speaking as Tesco's Polish employees announced a series of go-slows to persuade the company to allow them Sundays off. The go-slows involve working to rule and check-out staff typing in numbers for each purchase rather than scanning them.

Solidarity announced the go-slows on the 7 June Corpus Christi public holiday, after repeatedly urging Tesco, which employs 25,000 people in Poland, to take local customs into consideration. A priest from the town of Gorzow in the south-west of the country, Fr Zbigniew Samociak, complained that his cathedral was now dwarfed by an adjoining Tesco, open 17 hours a day, seven days a week, and said that the firm routinely prevented Catholic employees from attending Mass and showed "no respect" for Polish religious occasions.

Meanwhile, a Solidarity leader, Jaroslaw Porwich, said staffers at Tesco, which claimed Polish profits of £1.2 billion last year, were among the country's lowest paid. Polish legislators rejected a Labour Code amendment in 2001 that would have forced superstores to close on Sundays after claims that the move would have caused 16,000 job losses. The Tablet received no reply when it sought a response to the complaints from Tesco's Warsaw press office.