Poland: Solidarność, When a Union Brought Down a State

by bam

In August 1980, workers at a shipyard in Gdańsk went on strike and posted twenty-one demands on the gate. Demand number one was not about pay, it was the right to form a trade union free of the Communist Party. Within a year that union, Solidarność, had roughly ten million members, about a third of Poland. Nine years later it negotiated the communist state out of existence and swept the first partly-free election in the Soviet bloc. No other country in this track shows a trade union as the primary engine of a political revolution, a union that brought down a government. That is the spine of this course, taught with the repression and not just the triumph: martial law, internment, nine miners shot dead at the Wujek colliery, a decade underground. Then the honest ending, which is the actual lesson: the union won the country and then lost the workplace. Solidarity's own governments ran the shock-therapy reforms of the 1990s, unemployment climbed from zero to over 16%, and today Poland's union density (about 9%, 2022, OECD/AIAS) is among the lowest in the European Union, its bargaining fragmented to the single company. A union won a country and could not hold the shop floor. Cited to UNESCO's Memory of the World, the European Solidarity Centre, Statistics Poland (GUS), OECD/AIAS and ETUI. A country course in the Workers' Rights track, take "The History of Unions: America and the World" first.