Within a year the hope that changes that had been ushered in following Stalin’s death would be permanent were dashed. At the Ninth Party Plenum in May 1957, as the PZPR embarked on internal reforms aimed at bringing an end to the divisiveness and factionalism of previous years, it sought to reestablish control over a restive organized labor. In particular, it moved to abrogate the procedural concessions granted after the Poznań protests. Especially targeted were workers’ councils, established in response to workers’ demands for more meaningful representation within enterprises, and which had oversight over management and controlled wage funds and premium distribution.10 The party viewed this concession as potentially undermining the PZPR’s control over organized labor. Indeed, when the party made similar procedural concessions in the 1980s, they significantly augmented labor’s power.
During the plenum, the prerogatives of workers’ councils were transferred to trade unions, and the December 1958 legislation that established the Conference of Workers’ Self-Management effectively restored the PZPR’s dominance within enterprises by giving the party a central position within the councils.11 Thus, during the late 1950s the PZPR was still able to relatively easily withdraw procedural concessions once the immediate crisis was over. It could do so because it was still able to meet demands for wage increases and improved standards of living. In other words, the party could withdraw politically threatening procedural concessions by offering workers sufficiently attractive substantive concessions and therefore maintain its dominance over organized labor.
Despite the backtracking on these pledges, however, the events of 1956 were an important precedent in state-labor relations. Most significant, they made clear the tenuousness of workers’ support for the regime, the inadequacy of political and union institutions in controlling labor, and the importance of worker self-management to labor groups. The substantive concessions, by contrast, proved for a time to be invaluable in ensuring labor quiescence, especially when the growth of a more organized opposition among the intelligentsia led in 1968 to a confrontation between this group and the regime. While students were demonstrating, workers were unwilling to join them in challenging the PZPR.
The 1970 Confrontation
As the economy began running into trouble in the second half of the 1960s these substantive concessions became increasingly costly to maintain. The regime found itself in a predicament. Unless it undertook reforms to restore economic growth, social unrest sparked by declining standards of living could threaten political stability. Yet pushing through with restructuring was also fraught with danger, since it would inevitably entail belt-tightening measures. Intensifying factional struggles within the party elite made cobbling together a reform package difficult. Eventually, the PZPR agreed to measures aimed at spurring growth, improving industrial efficiency, and linking workers’ remuneration to improvements in productivity. At the same time, in order to address the ballooning budget deficit, the party decided to raise the prices of some consumer goods.
Workers responded immediately to the December 1970 price hikes. On December 14 strikes broke out in the Gdańsk shipyard. Workers demanded withdrawal of price increases and granting of greater political freedoms. The police response was brutal and dozens of workers were killed, leading to massive demonstrations and the firebombing of the PZPR’s headquarters. Within days protests spilled to other seaside cities. By the second part of the month similar protests erupted in Warsaw, Katowice, Poznań, Wrocław, Słupsk, Elbląg, Krakòw, and Łòdź.12
The protests were a watershed in state-labor relations. Not only was the scale of protests unprecedented, but workers’ demands were not just economic but also explicitly political. Furthermore, many local party and trade union activists, the very ones whom the regime relied on to maintain control over workers, joined the protests. In Gdańsk and Szczecin, workers elected strike committees that were responsible for maintaining channels of communication with other striking enterprises and for negotiating with regime representatives. For the first time, workers explicitly demanded the establishment of independent union organizations.13
Although force was used against workers in Gdańsk, the regime was immobilized by an intensifying struggle for control of the party being waged by three factions and appeared unable to decide how best to respond to the crisis. The strongest of these factions, led by Edward Gierek, party leader from the southern coal mining region, appealed to workers for support, promising substantive concessions. Criss-crossing the country, Gierek pleaded with workers not to abandon the party but to help resolve the economic crisis. To ensure that this help would be forthcoming, the Gierek faction pushed for measures that would guarantee improvements in workers’ living standards.
By the end of January, the regime scrapped the new wage-determination system and in February rescinded price increases and extended additional subsidies and benefits.14 Finally, as had happened following the 1956 riots, the PZPR sacked the top party leadership. Although the party ignored workers’ political demands and only offered substantive concessions, the 1970 confrontation foreshadowed the more sustained mobilization of opposition forces that began in the second half of the 1970s and culminated in the formation of the independent trade union Solidarity in 1980. By then, the concessions that the party was forced to make by the increasingly militant labor opposition fundamentally reshaped the relationship between state and labor. The consequences of the PZPR’s procedural concessions significantly constrained the policy-making options of posttransition governments.
The 1976 Confrontation
The party elite was aware that the economic payoffs offered after the 1970 protests were only a stopgap measure and that it could not ignore the political demands articulated during the protests. The new party leadership thought the protests reflected unions’ loss of worker support, trust, and respect. It therefore embarked on restructuring internal union organization. As one leader of the official unions pointed out, “Union institutions have been widely criticized for not adequately representing working people’s interests and not fighting sufficiently for their rights. Consequently, in some enterprises labor organizations were bypassed when workers wanted to present and resolve their problems.”15
Workers saw trade union leaders not as their representatives but as allies of company management. This perception was not surprising, since unions focused primarily on maintaining workforce discipline and ensuring that enterprises met their production targets. To make unions more representative, they would now place emphasis on responding to workers’ concerns and keeping workers informed about the actions taken by the unions on their behalf. Simultaneously, the party took steps to renew workers’ identification with the PZPR. It instructed the CRZZ leadership to more closely coordinate activities between enterprise-level union and party organizations. At the same time the party encouraged workers’ self-government organizations within enterprises to play a more constructive role. The party leadership felt that if workers came to see the former as representing workers’ interests rather than those of management, workers’ councils would contribute to easing tensions within enterprises.
The PZPR hoped that by being more attentive to workers’ concerns and by promoting their political education, workers’ councils would facilitate peaceful conflict resolution within enterprises and return workers to the party’s support coalition. As one regional party newspaper put it, “The most important mission of trade unions, socialist state institutions and party organizations is to prevent conflictual situations.”16 Within a few years, however, it was clear that these measures did little to diffuse workers’ grievances or to establish better control over labor.
In 1976, sparked by a new round of price hikes on basic commodities, protests erupted in Radom and Ursus. Although the regime harassed and prosecuted strike leaders, many within the party leadership felt that Gierek’s relative tolerance of opposition groups was encouraging more “counterrevolutionary” activities rather than appeasing the protesters.17 In fact, following the 1976 workers’ protests, some within the opposition intelligentsia began forming closer ties with workers to more effectively pressure the regime to implement substantial political and economic reforms. They formed the Workers Defense Committee (KOR) to provide legal and financial assistance to workers prosecuted by the government. However, when a year after the