Solidarity

ON JULY 1, 1980, the communist regime in Poland announced price increases. With a centrally planned economy, no market control, and fictitious prices of products and wages, the government and the Polish United Workers' Party that ruled Poland had no other means to try and overcome the disastrous economic crisis. One week later, numerous factories in various parts of Poland went on strike. Initially, the western provinces and then later all of Poland stopped working. Strikes reached the biggest Polish seaport and shipbuilding industry towns: Gdansk and Gdynia. It was the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk where a mass strike started at the beginning of August.

The local strike committee, led by an electrician, Lech Walesa, was soon transformed into an Interfactory Strike Committee, which took up the struggle against the communist authorities not only for the workers of the shipyard, but on behalf of all people employed in Poland. The committee, which was referred to as Solidarity (Solidarnosc), put forth a list of 21 demands to be met by the Communist Party and government. These included: the right to form independent unions, right to strike, freedom of speech and press, freeing of political prisoners, and numerous social and economic demands. On August 31, an agreement was signed between the committee represented by Walesa and Deputy Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Jagielski. As soon as the agreement was signed, workers at various factories and enterprises in Poland started to organize themselves into union groups. It should be added, that in the communist system, labor unions existed, but were not independent of the employer (the state) and were an extension of the Communist Party linked with the regime authorities.

On September 17, the emerging unions decided to band together and erect one central, general union called Solidarity. By this time (two weeks after the agreement was signed), the union rolls all over Poland numbered close to four million members and the decision to form one powerful union rather than hundreds of [Page 409]small, weak ones was a shock to the communist authorities. On November 10, following debates with the authorities and mutual threats, Solidarity was formally registered as a union.

The next 13 months saw a strange relationship between the ruling Communist Party and the union—which grew to number about 10 million members (about 70 percent of all professionally active people in Poland). Solidarity was gaining its demands through strikes or threat of strike. This was true both on a local and national scale. Solidarity's demands were, in most cases, limited to social conditions in factories, wages, and workers' rights. Theoretically, there was no unemployment in the communist system and all who wanted to work were employed; well over 95 percent of people were employed in state enterprises. The private sector was marginal. Thus, a communist regime, based on Marxist-Leninist theory and claiming it was a people's system of government, was challenged by a labor union demanding workers' rights be respected and work conditions be improved.

On December 13, 1981, the government, headed by Prime Minister General Wojciech Jaruzelski (who also held the posts of the first secretary of the Communist Party and minister of defense) introduced martial law and declared Solidarity illegal. Almost 10,000 Solidarity members were detained. Walesa, now president of Solidarity, was arrested as well. An 18-month-long struggle between the communist authorities (who had to report to Moscow, Soviet Union) and the independent labor union appeared to come to an end.

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