Poland’s recent entry into the EU and attendant commitment to the achievement of a range of ambitious labour market and social targets has served merely to re-emphasise the ongoing need for the rationalisation of perhaps its most conspicuous socialist paradox; namely, a private agricultural sector that on one count employs over one quarter of the country’s workers. Using multinomial estimation on an annual panel of individual data from the Labour Force Survey, this paper confirms the impression of stagnation conveyed by the gross movements computable from published statistics and underlines the severity of the challenge posed by the necessary restructuring. The inescapable conclusion points to the need for radical policy innovation.