Solidarity (Polish trade union)

• 1. Introduction

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  Solidarity, the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union founded in August 1980 at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland, began not with a grand political declaration but with a dismissal notice. Anna Walentynowicz, a crane operator, was fired from the Gdansk Shipyard on the 7th of August 1980, five months before she was due to retire, because she had joined an illegal trade union. That single act of management spite lit a fuse. Workers downed tools and walked out four days later, and what followed would shake the Soviet bloc to its foundations. Within a little over a year, ten million people had joined. Within a decade, communist rule in Poland was finished. The questions worth asking are: how did a dockyard walkout become the largest trade union in the world? Who sustained it through martial law and mass arrests? And what did it mean for the rest of Eastern Europe when it finally prevailed?

• 2. The Strike That Started Everything

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  Walentynowicz and her colleague Alina Pienkowska transformed what had begun as a narrowly focused workplace dispute into something far larger. Instead of settling once the shipyard's own demands were met, they persuaded their fellow workers to stay out in sympathy with strikers at other establishments across Poland. That decision to hold the line changed the character of the action entirely. On the 31st of August 1980, the Communist government of Poland formally signed an agreement at the Gdansk Shipyard acknowledging the union's right to exist. It was the first time any Warsaw Pact state had granted legal recognition to an independent trade union. On the 17th of September, more than twenty Inter-factory Founding Committees merged into a single national organisation, NSZZ Solidarnosc. Official registration came on the 10th of November 1980. By September 1981, membership had reached ten million, representing one-third of the country's entire working-age population, and the union's first national congress elected Lech Walesa as president, adopting a program called the "Self-governing Republic".

• 3. Martial Law and Underground Survival

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  General Wojciech Jaruzelski imposed martial law on the 13th of December 1981, and the government moved fast. The thirty-eight regional delegates of Solidarity were arrested and jailed that day. After a one-year prison term, high-ranking members were offered one-way trips to countries willing to take them, including Canada, the United States, and nations in the Middle East. The union was driven underground but did not collapse. Substantial financial support arrived from two directions: the Vatican and the United States. The Central Intelligence Agency transferred around two million dollars yearly in cash to Solidarity from 1982 onwards, totalling approximately ten million dollars over five years. All of it was channelled through third parties, since CIA officers were barred from meeting Solidarity leaders directly. Separately, the AFL-CIO raised three hundred thousand dollars from its members and delivered material and cash to Solidarity with no conditions attached. The National Endowment for Democracy allocated a further ten million dollars to the union. Henry Hyde, a member of the U.S. House intelligence committee, described the American contribution as covering clandestine newspapers, broadcasting, propaganda, money, and organisational advice. Colonel Ryszard Kuklinski, a senior officer on the Polish General Staff, had meanwhile been secretly passing reports to CIA officer David Forden, giving Western intelligence an inside view of the Polish military's intentions.

• 4. The Pope and the Philosophy

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  Walesa himself named Pope John Paul II, and specifically the Pope's 1979 visit to Poland, as a significant factor in Solidarity's creation. John Paul II was Polish-born, a figure the country's citizens could identify with personally and one the Communist regime could not reach or silence. His standing lent moral authority to a movement that had declared itself committed to non-violence from the outset. The intellectual architecture of that commitment had been laid earlier, in part by Leszek Kolakow ski, a philosopher whose works were officially banned in Poland. Kolakowski had left the country in the late 1960s, but underground copies of his books and essays continued to circulate. His 1971 essay Theses on Hope and Hopelessness argued that self-organised social groups could steadily push back the boundaries of civil society even inside a totalitarian state. That argument provided a theoretical spine for the dissident networks of the 1970s and, later, for Solidarity itself. Kolakowski went further in his assessment: he called Solidarity perhaps the closest thing to the workers' revolution Karl Marx had predicted in the mid-1800s, describing it as a revolutionary movement of industrial workers, strongly backed by the intelligentsia, directed against the state as exploiter. He noted, with deliberate irony, that this sole candidate for a working-class revolution was aimed at a socialist state and carried out under the sign of the cross, with the Pope's blessing.

• 5. The 1989 Elections and Their Consequences

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  Round Table negotiations ran from the 6th of February to the 5th of April 1989, bringing the government and Solidarity-led opposition to the same table for the first time. The agreement they reached produced semi-free elections on the 4th of June 1989. A new upper chamber, the Senate, was created in the Polish parliament, and all one hundred of its seats were open to genuine competition; one-third of the seats in the more powerful lower chamber, the Sejm, were also contestable. Solidarity won ninety-nine of the one hundred Senate seats and all one hundred and sixty-one contestable Sejm seats. By the end of August 1989, a Solidarity-led coalition government was in place, with Tadeusz Mazowiecki elected Prime Minister, the first non-communist to hold that office since the 1940s. In December 1990, Walesa was elected President of Poland. The Polish result triggered a chain reaction. Elections in Poland were the first free elections in any Soviet-bloc country, and the sweep Solidarity achieved demonstrated that Communist parties could not survive open competition. The events that followed across Central and Eastern Europe, known collectively as the Revolutions of 1989, ended with the overthrow of every Moscow-imposed regime in the region. The broader collapse of the Soviet bloc culminated in the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Solidarity had entered those elections with the memory of what the Polish Communist party had done in 1970: machine-gun fire that killed over thirty people and injured more than a thousand during a protest that year.

• 6. An Organisation After Victory

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  Winning created its own complications. After 1989, Solidarity shed the broad social movement character that had made it extraordinary and settled into the role of a conventional trade union. Its political influence faded rapidly in the early 1990s. A political arm founded in 1996 as Solidarity Electoral Action won the parliamentary election in 1997 but lost the following 2001 election, and by the early 2000s the union's direct role in Polish politics had diminished sharply. Membership reflected the change in scale: where ten million had carried cards at the peak, the figure stood at more than four hundred thousand by 2010. The union's structure remained formally rooted in the regional model established at its founding, now comprising thirty-seven regions whose boundaries broadly follow the shape of Polish administrative divisions created in 1975. The National Commission of the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union is based in Gdansk. In 2017, Solidarity backed a proposal for blue laws prohibiting Sunday shopping, supported by Polish bishops, and the resulting legislation took effect in 2018, closing large supermarkets and most retailers on Sundays for the first time since liberal shopping rules had been introduced in the 1990s. Piotr Duda has served as chairman since 2010, following Marian Krzaklewski and Janusz Sniadek, who between them led the union for the two decades after Walesa stepped down in 1991.

• 7. Resonance Beyond Poland

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  Solidarity's example moved across borders in ways that were sometimes unexpected. In 1984-85, during the UK miners' strike, Walesa's public position was guarded: he said miners should fight but with common sense, not with destruction, and praised Margaret Thatcher as wise and brave. David Jastrzebski, president of Upper Silesia Solidarity, took the opposite line, expressing solidarity with the British strikers and drawing a direct comparison between British mounted police charges and the Polish junta's tanks. The divergence illustrated how a movement that had unified ten million people at home could split over how to interpret a labour dispute abroad. Arthur Scargill, president of the British National Union of Mineworkers, condemned Solidarity as an anti-socialist organisation seeking to overthrow a socialist state. In late 2008, several democratic opposition groups in the Russian Federation formed a movement under the Solidarity name. In a 2011 essay, philosopher Slavoj Zizek described Solidarnosc as one of the free spaces at a distance from state power that employed defensive violence to protect itself from state control. A conflict summary commissioned by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, written by Maciej Bartkowski, offered a different framing: Solidarity always pursued its political objectives with a high degree of nonviolent discipline and self-imposed limitations. The network of Solidarity branches covering Poland's key factories had been established on the 14th of April 1981 in Gdansk, built from representatives of seventeen factories, each standing for the most important plant in its voivodeship before the 1975 administrative reorganisation.