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Solidarity
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History
Solidarity was founded in September 1980 at the Lenin Shipyards, where Lech Walesa and others formed a broad anti-communist social movement ranging from people associated with the Catholic Church to members of the anti-communist Left. Solidarity advocated nonviolence in its members' activities. The government attempted to destroy the union with the martial law of 1981 and several years of repression, but in the end it had to start negotiating with the union.
In Poland, the Roundtable Talks between the weakened government and Solidarity-led opposition led to semi-free elections in 1989. By the end of August a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed and in December Tadeusz Mazowiecki was elected Prime Minister. Since 1989 Solidarity has become a more traditional trade union, and had relatively little impact on the political scene of Poland in the early 1990s.
Discussion
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Timeline
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1980 After weeks of strikes at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, Poland, the nationwide independent trade union Solidarity is established.
1980 The Polish government recognizes Solidarity.
1981 Wojciech Jaruzelski declares martial law in Poland, to prevent the dismantling of the communist system by Solidarity.
1982 Poland bans Solidarity.
1982 The leader of Poland's outlawed Solidarity movement, Lech Walesa, is released from 11 months of internment near the Soviet border.
1984 Polish secret police arrest Jerzy Popieluszko, a Catholic priest who supports the Solidarity movement. His dead body is found in a reservoir 11 days later on October 30.
1989 Poland's Communist party votes to legalize Solidarity.
1989 Solidarity's victory in the first partly free parliamentary elections in post-war Poland is the first of many anti-communist revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 (almost all of them peaceful).
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Encyclopedia
History
Solidarity was founded in September 1980 at the Lenin Shipyards, where Lech Walesa and others formed a broad anti-communist social movement ranging from people associated with the Catholic Church to members of the anti-communist Left. Solidarity advocated nonviolence in its members' activities. The government attempted to destroy the union with the martial law of 1981 and several years of repression, but in the end it had to start negotiating with the union.
In Poland, the Roundtable Talks between the weakened government and Solidarity-led opposition led to semi-free elections in 1989. By the end of August a Solidarity-led coalition government was formed and in December Tadeusz Mazowiecki was elected Prime Minister. Since 1989 Solidarity has become a more traditional trade union, and had relatively little impact on the political scene of Poland 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. Currently Solidarity has little political influence in modern Polish politics.
Catholic social teaching In Solicitudo Rei Socialis, a major document of Catholic Social Teaching, Pope John Paul II identifies the concept of solidarity with the poor and marginalized as a constitutive element of the Gospel and human participation in the common good. The Roman Catholic Church, under the leadership of Pope John Paul II, was a very powerful supporter of the union and was greatly responsible for its success.
Influence abroadThe survival of Solidarity was an unprecedented event not only in Poland, a satellite state of the USSR ruled (in practice) by a one-party Communist regime, but the whole of the Eastern bloc. It meant a break in the hard-line stance of the communist Polish United Workers' Party, which had bloodily ended a 1970 protest with machine gun fire (killing dozens and injuring over 1,000), and the broader Soviet communist regime in the Eastern Bloc, which had quelled both the 1956 Hungarian Uprising and the 1968 Prague Spring with Soviet-led invasions.
Solidarity's influence led to the intensification and spread of anti-communist ideals and movements throughout the countries of the Eastern Bloc, weakening their communist governments. The 1989 elections in Poland where anti-communist candidates won a striking victory sparked off a succession of peaceful anti-communist revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe known as the Revolutions of 1989 (Jesien Ludów). Solidarity's example was in various ways repeated by opposition groups throughout the Eastern Bloc, eventually leading to the Eastern Bloc's effectual dismantling, and contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the early 1990s.
Organization
Formed in 1981, the union's supreme powers were vested in a legislative body, the Convention of Delegates (Zjazd Delegatów). The executive branch was the National Coordinating Commission (Krajowa Komisja Porozumiewawcza), later renamed the National Commission (Komisja Krajowa). The Union had a regional structure, comprising 38 regions (region) and two districts (okreg). During the communist era the 38 regional delegates were arrested and jailed when martial law came into effect 1983 under Jaruzelski. After a one year prison term the high-ranking members of the union were offered one way trips to any country accepting them (Canada, United States, South Africa, Germany, Switzerland).
Solidarity was organized as an industrial union, or more specifically according to the One Big Union principle, along the lines of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (workers in every trade were organized by region, rather than by craft).
Currently, Solidarity has more than 1.1 million members. National Commission of Independent Self-Governing Trade Union is located in Gdansk and is composed of Delegates from Regional General Congresses.
Chairmen
External links
Further reading
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