Solidarity Movement in Poland
Polish workers occupied the Lenin shipyard in Gdańsk in August 1980 and came out with a legal independent trade union, which no communist state had ever permitted. The strike began over the dismissal of a crane operator, Anna Walentynowicz, five months before her pension. What made it different from the risings of 1956, 1970 and 1976 was the method. The workers stayed inside the yard rather than marching into the streets, where they could be shot; they organised food, medicine and a printing press; and when the management conceded the local demands, Lech Wałęsa persuaded them to continue in solidarity with other factories. The interfactory strike committee that resulted covered several hundred enterprises. Its twenty-one demands began with the right to form unions independent of the party, and included the right to strike, freedom of expression, the release of political prisoners, and the broadcasting of Sunday mass. The government signed on 31 August because it could not do anything else, and Solidarity had ten million members within a year — a quarter of the population and a third of the party's own membership. The intellectual opposition that had formed after 1976 supplied the advisers, and the election of a Polish pope in 1978 had already shown the country that it was not alone. Martial law was declared in December 1981 and the union was banned and continued underground. It won the partly free election of June 1989 and the bloc came apart within months. The twenty-one demands were written on two plywood boards nailed to the shipyard gate so that everyone could read them, and the boards are now in the UNESCO Memory of the World register. The Gdańsk agreement is the only case of a communist government conceding an independent mass organisation and surviving the year.
- Year: 1980 CE
- Category: Political
