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Essay on The Solidarity Movement in Poland
Officially called the Independent Self-Governing Trade Union Solidarity the movement was a 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' (communist) 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 Robotnikow; 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.During a growing wave of new strikes in 1980 protesting rising food prices, Gdansk 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 Walesa, an electrician by trade.
In mid-August 1980 an Interfactory Strike Committee was established in Gdansk 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 30, accords reached between the government and the Gdansk 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 Gdansk and united under the name Solidarnoshc.......
