Word: gdansk
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...victory the workers believed they had won, remained to be seen. There were those, understandably, who did not take much comfort in Kama's background. But there were also those who recalled that at the height of the strikes Kania had been quoted as telling the Gdansk party organization that it was a time "for a political solution-not for force." The only thing that could be reasonably certain, given the risky experiments the country and the workers had embarked upon, was that Kania was surely a man to Moscow's liking...
...week had begun with life in the Baltic port of Gdansk getting back to normal. Before dawn, city trams and buses began their rounds through the chilly, rainswept streets. Workers filed through factory gates. Dockers started to unload the dozens of ships stacked up in the harbor. As seagulls wheeled and cried overhead, the multicolored cranes at Lenin Shipyard arced through the air hauling heavy metal parts. Indeed, it almost seemed as if nothing much had changed since 16,000 shipyard workers had walked off the job and occupied the sprawling complex for 18 days...
...reality, all of Poland had been shaken. The Lenin Shipyard strike had transformed a series of scattered protests over rising meat prices into a workers' crusade for sweeping economic and political reforms. From its nerve center in Gdansk, the movement quickly swept the Baltic coast, spread southward, and finally reached deep into the coal-mining heartland of Silesia. Before the strikes had ended, some 500,000 workers at over 500 enterprises had joined the peaceful but crippling revolt. The work stoppages had cost hundreds of millions of dollars, pushing the country to the brink of disaster and testing...
...three tense weeks, the world had watched a surreal spectacle: a Communist government at first denouncing, then publicly negotiating with, its own rebellious workers. No less remarkable was the display of discipline, organization and shrewd negotiating skills provided by the Gdansk-based Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS) that became the bargaining agent for over 400 Baltic enterprises. Most astounding of all were the agreements that finally ended the major strikes. In addition to pay raises and increased social benefits, Gierek's regime had granted -on paper at least-a spate of political concessions unprecedented anywhere in a Communist country: independent...
...Lech Walesa arrived with a bunch of gladioli and a large crucifix to open up the temporary union headquarters. He stretched out his hands, looked skyward and proclaimed: "I am in an empty room, but one full of hope." Walesa said that he and the other members of the Gdansk strike committee would serve as interim officers until elections can be held; but he confessed that no one yet knows how the new unions will operate. The settlement stipulated that any worker could choose to remain in the old party-controlled unions and even envisioned "the possibility of cooperation between...