Solidarity

Solidarity, Polish trade union that in the early 1980s became the first independent labour union in a country belonging to the Soviet bloc. Solidarity was founded in September 1980, was forcibly suppressed by the Polish government in December 1981, and reemerged in 1989 to become the first opposition movement to participate in free elections in a Soviet-bloc nation since the 1940s. Solidarity subsequently formed a coalition government with Poland’s United Workers’ Party (PUWP), after which its leaders dominated the national government.

The origin of Solidarity traces back to 1976, when a Workers’ Defense Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotników; KOR) was founded by a group of dissident intellectuals after several thousand striking workers had been attacked and jailed by authorities in various cities. The KOR supported families of imprisoned workers, offered legal and medical aid, and disseminated news through an underground network. In 1979 it published a Charter of Workers’ Rights.

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During a growing wave of new strikes in 1980 protesting rising food prices, Gdańsk became a hotbed of resistance to government decrees. Some 17,000 workers at the Lenin Shipyards there staged a strike and barricaded themselves within the plant under the leadership of Lech Wałęsa, an electrician by trade. In mid-August 1980 an Interfactory Strike Committee was established in Gdańsk to coordinate rapidly spreading strikes there and elsewhere; within a week it presented the Polish government with a list of demands that were based largely on KOR’s Charter of Workers’ Rights. On August 31, accords reached between the government and the Gdańsk strikers sanctioned free and independent unions with the right to strike, together with greater freedom of religious and political expression.

Solidarity formally was founded on September 22, 1980, when delegates of 36 regional trade unions met in Gdańsk and united under the name Solidarność. The KOR subsequently disbanded, its activists becoming members of the union, and Wałęsa was elected chairman of Solidarity. A separate agricultural union composed of private farmers, named Rural Solidarity (Wiejska Solidarność), was founded in Warsaw on December 14, 1980. By early 1981 Solidarity had a membership of about 10 million people and represented most of the work force of Poland.

Throughout 1981 the government (led by General Wojciech Jaruzelski) was confronted by an ever stronger and more demanding Solidarity, which inflicted a series of controlled strikes to back up its appeals for economic reforms, for free elections, and for the involvement of trade unions in decision making at the highest levels. Solidarity’s positions hardened as the moderate Wałęsa came to be pressured by more militant unionists. Jaruzelski’s government, meanwhile, was subjected to severe pressure from the Soviet Union to suppress Solidarity.

On December 13, 1981, Jaruzelski imposed martial law in Poland in a bid to crush the Solidarity movement. Solidarity was declared illegal, and its leaders were arrested. The union was formally dissolved by the Sejm (Parliament) on October 8, 1982, but it nevertheless continued as an underground organization.

In 1988 a new wave of strikes and labour unrest spread across Poland, and prominent among the strikers’ demands was government recognition of Solidarity. In April 1989 the government agreed to legalize Solidarity and allow it to participate in free elections to a bicameral Polish parliament. In the elections, held in June of that year, candidates endorsed by Solidarity won 99 of 100 seats in the newly formed Senate (upper house) and all 161 seats (of 460 total) that opposition candidates were entitled to contest in the Sejm (lower house). In August Solidarity agreed to form a coalition government with the PUWP, and a longtime Solidarity adviser, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, on August 24 became the first noncommunist premier to govern Poland since the late 1940s. In December 1990 Wałęsa was elected president of Poland after splitting with Mazowiecki in a dispute over the pace of Poland’s conversion to a market economy. The split between Wałęsa and Mazowiecki prevented the formation of a Solidarity-backed coalition to govern the country in the wake of the PUWP’s collapse, and the union’s direct role in Poland’s new parliamentary scene dwindled as many new political parties emerged in the early 1990s.