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2 RULING PARTIES, ORGANIZED LABOR, AND TRANSITIONS TO DEMOCRACY

Poland and Czechoslovakia

When the Polish and Czechoslovak governments initiated economic reforms following the fall of Communism, they encountered very different labor organizations. Polish unions, as will be examined in Chapter 4, emerged as influential actors and significantly shaped the process of privatization design and implementation. Unions in Czechoslovakia, however, were unable to play such a central role during the reform processes. The source of this difference between the two cases can be located in the state-labor dynamics of the pre-reform period. The contentious encounters between the Polish ruling party and labor resulted in the acquisition by the latter of important resources, in particular, legal prerogatives, financial autonomy, and the long experience of successfully challenging the state. Thanks to these resources, Polish organized labor could not be brushed aside by the government as the latter sought to push through market reforms. Czechoslovak organized labor traveled along a very different trajectory that left it with few resources it could draw upon as it confronted structural adjustment reforms. This chapter will examine how despite similar initial conditions following the Communist takeover in both countries, organized labor entered the new democratic era with such differing resources.

The Labor Movement in Communist Poland

In July 1944 on Polish territory controlled by the advancing Soviet army, the Polish Workers Party (PPR) announced the formation of a new government. A bloody and protracted civil war, with the Home Army supported by the Polish government in exile, based in London, followed as the PPR sought to consolidate power. Immediately following the end of World War II it appeared that an agreement hammered out in Yalta between the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain that mandated free elections in Poland would hold. In June 1945 Stanisław Mikołajczyk, the prime minister of Poland’s government in exile and leader of the Polish Peasant Party (PSL), returned and joined the PPR-dominated government. In January 1947 the PPR, which ran in coalition with the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) and two smaller parties, the Democratic Alliance (SD) and the Peasant Alliance (SL), won the parliamentary elections largely thanks to fraud and intimidation.¹

Following the election the PPR quickly moved to consolidate power. In October 1947, facing imminent arrest, Mikołajczyk fled the country. In December 1948 the PPR merged with the PPS, forming the Polish United Workers Party (PZPR).² By 1949 the new regime had abolished all independent political parties and organizations and began the process of Stalinization, sending thousands of political foes to prison or into exile. The PZPR, led by first secretary Bolesław Bierut, also expanded the police apparatus extending surveillance over the population and the party itself. In March 1949 it created a special department within the Ministry of Security and charged it with the elimination of all opposition forces that may have penetrated the party. Within the next couple of years, in the name of the “battle for revolutionary vigilance,” numerous high party dignitaries were expelled from the PZPR. Others were incarcerated. The PZPR also moved to transform the Polish economy, nationalizing industry and instituting central planning mechanisms. At the same time that the PZPR was busy eliminating its political rivals, it also sought to appeal to the rural and urban poor with promises to undertake revolutionary socioeconomic restructuring of the society.

Containing political opposition and mobilizing support also meant that the party had to extend control over organized labor, which had become increasingly militant in the 1930s. It entrusted Edward Ochab, a high-ranking party official, with formulating a plan to reshape union organization. In June 1949, a centralized trade union organization was formed, headed by Politburo member Aleksander Zawadzki, with branch unions subordinated to the Central Council of Trade Unions (CRZZ). Gradually, the number of branch unions was reduced from the prewar high of about three hundred to twenty-three. Forty-nine councils were established at the national level along with about thirty thousand factory councils.³ The party wanted to ensure that all workers joined the organization and the CRZZ membership quickly expanded. By 1949 it had 3.5 million members. In 1954 membership swelled to 4.5 million, leaving only 750,000 workers in state-owned enterprises outside union structures.⁴

In 1949 new labor legislation codified the hierarchical structure of labor organizations and defined the rights and responsibilities of the unions. At the lowest level, the factory unions were responsible for the administration of various social programs, such as those of health and recreation, that had been newly extended to workers. They were also responsible for ensuring cooperative relations between company management and employees and for fulfilling national economic plans. Additionally, they were expected to work closely with party cells that had been established in all firms to promote the ideological education of workers.⁵ At the national level, the CRZZ was guaranteed consultative powers in designing national development plans and wage policies.⁶

The suppression of political dissent, the expansion of the party apparatus, and the centralization of labor organizations under the PZPR’s control thus seemed to ensure that working-class activism would be channeled to support the new regime. The changes in economic policies provided further incentives for workers to remain within the new regime’s coalition of support. These changes ushered in a period of unprecedented social mobility, opening previously inaccessible opportunities for educational and professional advancement. Peasants left the countryside in large number to find employment in the expanding industrial sector. Blue-collar workers moved into administrative and managerial posts and staffed party bureaucracy, local administration, and central government ministries.⁷

The 1956 Confrontation

Worker support for the regime proved to be more conditional than the PZPR had anticipated and was predicated on continued improvement in living standards. Within a few years of coming to power, however, the regime was facing a growing economic crisis, making it difficult to meet these worker expectations. Further, conflicts that had simmered within the PZPR from its inception presented challenges to devising a response to the crisis. The main disagreement pitted those within the party leadership who advocated a national development path and were skeptical about the wisdom of transplanting such Soviet ideas as farm collectivization, against those who argued that the Soviet model should be closely replicated in Poland and pushed for acceleration of the industrialization program. In the late 1940s, this second group, led by Bolesław Bierut and Hilary Minc, appeared to gain the upper hand when Stanisław Gomułka, leader of the “nationalists,” was forced to resign from the party.

However, the push for agricultural reform proved futile. Peasants increasingly rebelled against forced collectivization and food production plummeted. As the economy began running into trouble by the mid-1950s, discontent among industrial workers grew as well. Workers’ grievances concerned primarily wages, production norms, and working conditions but also dissatisfaction with the performance of trade unions in representing their interests within companies.⁸ At the same time as discontent among workers grew, with the death of Stalin in 1953, political repression eased, press censorship weakened, and political discussions became increasingly open and often critical of the PZPR’s policies. Critical discussions also took place within the party itself, with democratic reforms now openly mentioned. This political opening and the growing economic crisis for the first time since the establishment of the Communist regime presented workers with an opportunity to challenge the state and demonstrated that the labor institutions set up by the PZPR were hard pressed to contain and manage growing worker discontent.

Tensions boiled over in June 1956 when worker protests broke out in Poznań. The initial demands focused on working conditions at the Cegielski factory. When the PZPR responded with threats, workers marched to the city center, where they were joined by students and workers from other enterprises. The demands turned political and the demonstrators clashed with the security police, threw Molotov cocktails at police headquarters, and stormed party offices. Eventually, the PZPR called in an estimated ten thousand soldiers, who dealt brutally with the protesters. Official sources claimed that fifty-three were killed. However, foreign press put the number at two thousand to three hundred and two thousand arrested.⁹ Although the protests were put down by force, concessions were immediately extended to workers to bring them back into the fold.

The 1956 workers’ demonstrations proved to be a harbinger of future conflicts between the regime and labor, conflicts that would gradually tilt the balance of power between the two. This first eruption of discontent also signaled how the party elite would seek to control labor opposition. While repression was deployed in this instance and would be used in future encounters as well, those within the party leadership who viewed repressive measures as the preferred response never gained full control of the party apparatus. Rather, they were always forced to contend with the faction supporting an indigenous development path. This faction believed that social groups, whether peasants or workers, needed to be offered positive inducements to remain supportive of the PZPR and advocated offering substantive concessions in exchange for that support. When those were deemed insufficient, this faction was also prepared to consider procedural concessions as a way to diffuse labor opposition, with the understanding that once the immediate crisis was over, these procedural concessions would be withdrawn. At the same time, labor protests tended to exacerbate internal conflict within the party, thus providing a window of opportunity for labor to extract concessions.

During the first few decades when the PZPR had material resources at its disposal, it was still able to withdraw some procedural concessions by extending more material inducements. Over time, however, as economic crises became more frequent and those material resources increasingly scarce, procedural concessions became more difficult to abrogate. In other words, over time labor organizations gradually succeeded in acquiring more legal prerogatives and valuable experience in confronting the state, which gave them a say in the day-to-day management of state firms and, by the 1980s, a greater say in national economic decision making.

The bloody clashes in Poznań intensified tensions within the party. While the reformists within the Central Committee wanted to continue the democratic reforms begun earlier, the conservative faction that dominated the Politburo resisted these changes. Eventually, appealing to the disaffected public, the reformers gained the upper hand and voted for Gomułka to become the first party secretary. For a brief moment, it seemed that the concessions workers won in Poznań would stand.

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 Radom and Ursus strikes the government amnestied jailed workers, KOR did not disband but rather continued to support various civil society initiatives and established a thriving underground publishing network. Among these publications was Robotnik (Worker), a newsletter that became widely circulated in factories and maintained a link between workers and intellectuals. KOR also proved to be very successful in raising foreign funding and assistance, much of which it used to benefit prosecuted workers.¹⁸

In response to this challenge, the regime once again tried to reenergize the discredited workers’ councils, hoping to diffuse growing labor discontent.¹⁹ But workers showed little interest in these powerless councils and they soon began to disappear.²⁰ As the official unions became increasingly discredited, workers began establishing independent workers, organizations, fundamentally challenging the party’s control over labor. In 1977 a free union was established in Radom. In 1978 the Free Trade Union of Silesia and the Committee for Free Trade Unions for the Baltic Coasts were created. They were followed in 1979 by the establishment of the Founding Committee of the Free Trade Unions of Western Pomerania. In establishing these independent organizations, workers explicitly criticized official unions and demanded better wages, free Saturdays, improved safety conditions, and promotions not dependent on loyalty to the party.²¹ These ideas provided the basis for the most profound challenge to the PZPR’s authority that erupted in the summer of 1980 and whose consequences for the relationship between organized labor and the state reverberated even once the Communist regime disintegrated in 1989.

The 1980 Rise of Solidarity

The combination of economic difficulties and workers’ anger at the lack of meaningful representation soon exploded again. As the economy slid deeper into recession, the regime again attempted to raise consumer prices. And once again the result was worker protests, this time at a much larger scale and with even more profound consequences for both intraregime dynamics and the state-labor relationship. In August 1980, strikes erupted in the Gdańsk shipyard, giving birth to what became an eighteen-month period of unprecedented political and social mobilization under the banner of Solidarity. Initially a labor organization, Solidarity soon became a political opposition movement with a membership of 10 million. Solidarity’s demands included the establishment of independent trade unions, free speech, the dismantling of party members’ privileges, and government respect for citizens’ constitutional rights. The concessions that Solidarity eventually extracted had far-reaching consequences for the ability of organized labor to shape policy at both the national and enterprise levels and continued to shape state-labor relations after the 1989 transition to democracy.

The emergence of Solidarity posed a direct challenge to both the PZPR and the CRZZ, the latter headed by Politburo member Jan Szydlak. With the growth of a popular opposition movement, many officials within CRZZ began openly criticizing the federation’s leadership and frequently sided with striking Solidarity activists. At the August 1980 CRZZ meeting, the unionists accused their leadership of having abandoned their responsibility of representing workers; called for internal reforms within the official unions; and, in particular, demanded that the right to strike, veto power over government decisions on wages and prices, more union democracy, and independence from the PZPR be granted to union organizations.²²

The CRZZ leadership was deeply divided about how to respond to this challenge. One faction within the federation was unwilling to contemplate any changes in union structure. As its chairman, Szydlak, stated, “We shall not give up power and shall not share it.”²³ Others, however, argued that to retain rank-and-file loyalty, the federation had to be reformed. As one party official commented, “If the public feels that the unions do not fulfill their function satisfactorily, and that this overgrown structure has become outmoded, then it must be changed.”²⁴ The PZPR having decided that reform was necessary, expelled Szydlak from the Politburo. However, what other changes were needed was less clear to the increasingly divided party leadership.

Despite the call for the reform of CRZZ, more and more unions were leaving to establish themselves as independent organizations. Solidarity remained suspicious of this exodus, arguing that the defections were ordered by the PZPR to appropriate the mantle of independence and thereby defuse the challenge posed by the opposition movement.²⁵ The party therefore changed its strategy and on October 27 the CRZZ was dissolved and replaced by a new organization, the Coordinating Commission of Branch Trade Unions. Despite these reforms, the official unions continued to lose support and members to Solidarity. Corporatist labor institutions established by the party were disintegrating.

Solidarity, for its part, much more explicitly than previous worker opposition movements, framed its demands in terms of procedural rather than substantive issues. One of its central proposals concerned worker self-management within enterprises. The PZPR, mindful that it had few resources that would make possible material payoffs in exchange for renewed support, began considering procedural concessions in order to diffuse the political crisis. It formed a Government Economic Reform Commission to consider opposition movements’ demands and recommended the establishment of employee councils with veto powers over the appointment and dismissal of enterprise directors. Before the commission’s recommendations were made public, however, workers in many factories had already begun to set up their own self-management organizations, thereby creating facts on the ground. The regime was unable to stop or gain control over this process. In the long run, these changes in enterprise self-management would significantly reshape the balance of power between the regime and organized labor.

Solidarity’s self-management proposals emerged out of an association established between seven major enterprises. The association known as Sieć (Network) met for the first time in mid-April 1981. As Kolankiewicz notes, “The Network rejected the idea of participation in management and stipulated that self-management must appoint the director. Self-management would allow Solidarity to take a more constructive part in economic ‘renewal’ without accepting the responsibility for macroeconomic decisions in which they had no say.”²⁶ Founding Committees for Self-Management were to be set up in individual enterprises and would begin designing self-management proposals specifically tailored to each company.

Initially, the National Committee of Solidarity was ambivalent about the proposals put forth by Sieć, insisting that the movement should focus on establishing strong trade union organizations. Nevertheless, in many enterprises self-management structures began appearing anyway. In some cases Solidarity members cooperated with the old state-sponsored unions in setting them up. By the summer of 1981, the pressure on Solidarity leadership from the rank and file to establish control over enterprise management increased. In June 1981 in an unprecedented move, Sieć sent a draft of a new state enterprise law to the Sejm (parliament) for consideration.²⁷ In July, Solidarity chairman Lech Wałęsa finally came out in support of worker self-management.²⁸ Although the parliament voted down the proposal, many within the regime recognized that at least some of the Sieć demands would need to be satisfied if the party was to regain political initiative.

The emergence of Solidarity intensified the internal conflicts within the PZPR. Those within the leadership who advocated economic and political reforms pushed for granting procedural concessions to labor. The reformist faction argued that in light of the growing economic crisis few material concessions could be granted to workers to bring them back into the party fold. At the same time, it viewed extending such procedural concessions as a means of bolstering public support for the reform party faction, thus strengthening its hand in internal party struggles. The reformers won the argument and the regime quickly prepared its own plan for restructuring enterprise management and by early fall 1981 the parliament began considering the government bill. Its proposal rejected, Solidarity shifted tactics and began lobbying deputies to ensure that a number of provisions, and especially the right of workers’ councils to hire and fire enterprise directors, be included in the new legislation. In the end, the regime agreed to this concession and on September 26, 1981, the Sejm approved the law on state enterprises and worker self-management.²⁹

The new law gave extensive powers to the workers’ councils within enterprises. They now had control over general company activities. For example, they had the right to study and evaluate implementation of the annual plan and of contracts, analyze the annual report and budget, and evaluate all reports prepared by the director. The director also had to give the council access to all necessary company documentation so that the council could perform its oversight functions and be available to answer its questions about the state of the enterprise. In addition, the councils had the right to stop a director’s decision if it was contrary to a prior council’s decision, if it was taken without consulting the council when such consultation was required, or if it was taken without the council’s approval when such approval was required. Finally, the council had the right to hire and dismiss the enterprise director. These legal prerogatives of the workers’ councils would give organized labor the resources necessary to shape privatization policies in the post-1989 period.

Once granted, the procedural concessions proved difficult to rescind. Unlike in earlier periods, by the 1980s the continuing economic crises had left the regime with few resources to grant substantive concessions while withdrawing procedural ones. Since it could no longer make material side payments, the party found it politically difficult to abrogate the powers of the workers’ councils as it had two decades earlier. Hence, although the regime suspended workers’ councils when martial law was imposed in December 1981, within a year they were reactivated. Studies conducted among workers at the time indicated tremendous interest in reviving self-management. According to one survey, more than 83 percent of workers viewed self-management as very important and believed that it should be reinstituted as quickly as possible.³⁰ In fact, by 1983, self-management was reactivated in 78.4 percent of enterprises, and by 1986 workers’ councils were operating in 95 percent of companies. The councils had tremendous support among employees of state enterprises: 62.3 percent of workers wanted to have councils in their places of employment and a majority believed the councils would ensure that workers’ interests were adequately represented. Most workers also thought that the councils should play a more important role in the decision-making process at the enterprise level and have a direct role in policy making at the national level.³¹ Rather than attempting to take away these valued prerogatives, the regime sought to reduce the threat the councils posed to its monopoly on power.

To prevent the reemergence of an independent opposition network, the regime tried to prevent contact between councils in different enterprises. As a report prepared by the then illegal Solidarity trade union stated, “All attempts at communication and coordination between workers’ councils in different enterprises are the subject of special interest to the security services. Seeking to atomize the self-management movement the regime blocks all independent activity of the workers’ councils in this area.”³² This strategy was unsuccessful and workers’ councils cooperated with each other, coordinated responses on issues affecting workers, and remained very popular among workers themselves.³³ In addition, the attitude of the underground Solidarity toward workers’ councils began to change fundamentally. Although initially the union tried to boycott the councils, arguing that they were little more than another attempt by the regime to control workers, by 1985 the boycott was applied only selectively and in many enterprises that did not have workers’ councils Solidarity activists tried to establish them.³⁴

Although Solidarity was disbanded in 1982, the new trade union law adopted that same year reflected the regime’s recognition that it had to extend far-reaching concessions to organized labor if it wanted workers to return to its support coalition. The new law had profound consequences for the ability of trade unions to influence policy. It gave trade unions more rights and greater independence from the state and from management within individual enterprises. These changes were a direct result of the demands that came out of the August 1980 strikes and the agreements between the government and Solidarity. The new law gave the unions the right to evaluate and give opinions on all legal acts and decisions that affected the rights and interests of workers as well as the right to participate in the process of formulating new legal acts and decisions. They also had the right to evaluate the wage policies and work environment.³⁵ These legal changes meant that trade unions had access to all relevant information about the socioeconomic situation in the country. On the enterprise level, trade unions now had the right to represent and defend workers on issues of wages and working conditions. In addition, the new law gave unions the right to sign collective work agreements on the national level. Finally, the law once again legalized strikes, albeit with restrictions. Along with the legal prerogatives that workers’ councils acquired in this period, these legislative changes expanded organized labor’s resources and significantly increased their capacity to influence policy making in the post-1989 period.

In other words, in many ways the imposition of martial law was not quite the victory for the regime as it first appeared. Initially, the jailing of many labor activists and the disbanding of Solidarity appeared to restore the PZPR’s control over the political situation. Although during the first couple of years following December 1981 there were sporadic demonstrations and protests, with time these became less and less frequent and society as a whole withdrew from political activism. Yet not only were many of the procedural concessions granted during the Solidarity period enshrined in law, but the inability of the party elite to devise a consensus concerning the political and economic course of action meant that the economic situation continued to deteriorate.

Ironically, Solidarity, which unlike other Eastern and Central European trade unions was never financially dependant on the state, was able to tap into additional financial resources after it was delegalized. Various organizations funneled money and equipment to the organization. For example, in 1986 alone, the New York–based Institute for Democracy in Eastern Europe in cooperation with the Soros Foundation offered two hundred thousand dollars in assistance to Polish intellectuals and activists. In 1982–83, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is estimated to have provided Solidarity with close to $8 million and the National Endowment for Democracy in 1989 provided about $1 million to help Polish workers. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) was also one of Solidarity’s biggest foreign supporters, providing large assistance programs.³⁶ Thus, although delegalized, Solidarity continued to increase its financial resource base.

The shift in the balance of power away from the regime was amply demonstrated by the embarrassing defeat in the fall of 1987 of a government-sponsored referendum on an economic restructuring program. How problematic any reform measures would be was further underscored when, after a number of years of industrial peace, strikes broke out again in the spring of 1988. Although the immediate cause of the strike was demands for wage increases, the protests quickly acquired a political coloring when activists from the disbanded Solidarity took charge over the strike. While these protests were defused, in August of the same year a new wave of strikes swept the country.³⁷ The growing worker unrest underscored what Wojciech Jaruzelski’s more moderate PZPR faction had recognized for some time, namely, that without establishing a dialogue with the opposition there was little hope of bringing the country’s economy around. Later that year, first discussions were held between Wałęsa and representatives of the regime, eventually leading to what became the Roundtable negotiations that laid the groundwork for Poland’s political transition in the summer of 1989. As we shall see in Chapter 4, the contentious encounters between state and labor, which punctuated the country’s post–World War II history, left organized labor with important recourse—legal, financial, and experiential—that allowed it to significantly shape economic reform policies in the years following the transition.

Internal PZPR Dynamics

Conflicts between state and labor were a persistent feature of post–World War II Polish political dynamics. Workers took to the streets when living standards were threatened by deteriorating economic conditions and rising prices. More important, although the regime did not hesitate to repress these expressions of worker discontent, it also tended to fulfill many of the demands put forth by protesters. Initially, most of the concessions the regime offered were substantive in nature and entailed primarily wage and consumer subsidy increases. Later, it extended increasingly significant procedural concessions that weakened its control over organized labor and provided labor with important legal prerogatives as well as rich experience in successfully confronting the state. Thus, unlike its counterpart in neighboring Czechoslovakia, the Polish party elite struggled to maintain political control over organized labor, in the end failing to retain workers within its coalition of support. The internal dynamics of the PZPR shed light on why the party did not succeed in controlling and subordinating organized labor.

Following its establishment, the PZPR moved to suppress its political opponents while at the same time expanding party membership and presence within the country. Within a few years it had reached into every village and every industrial enterprise. Through control of the state administration, the media, and the educational system, the ruling party had numerous tools at its disposal to push through its policies, to control the flow of information, and to shape the ideological indoctrination of the public. The party harnessed labor activism by establishing a hierarchical labor confederation, the CRZZ. Most working Poles belonged to the CRZZ, whose primary mission was ensuring workers’ compliance with the political and economic goals set by the party

Despite these control mechanisms, the PZPR found it difficult to subordinate workers to the party and to maintain their political support. The periodic eruptions of labor protest resulted from the regime’s inability to improve living standards of workers in exchange for their political subordination. The PZPR’s reactions to these expressions of worker discontent were colored by internal party dynamics. Starting with the strikes in Poznań in 1956, the regime’s response was twofold. Although it tended to move swiftly and often brutally to quell the protests, it invariably gave in to many of the demands. And while the party elite usually backtracked on some of the concessions, it was never willing to abandon them wholesale. This pattern of labor protest and regime concessions reached a peak in 1980–81 when workers succeeded in forming and legalizing an independent trade union. Even when Solidarity was disbanded many significant Solidarity demands were enshrined in law, substantially strengthening the bargaining leverage of unions and workers’ councils at both the national and enterprise levels. In other words, over time the composition of the concessions granted changed. While initially these concessions were primarily substantive, later they shifted toward procedural ones.

These concessions to organized labor seem surprising in light of the apparent asymmetry of power between labor and the state. As will be discussed in the following chapter, such worker protests also occurred in Mexico. Yet in the Mexican case, while the regime was willing to be responsive to some demands concerning wage levels, its reaction was harsh whenever protests threatened to undermine the regime’s control over organized labor. In those instances, the PRI government did not hesitate to use force or mass layoffs. Similarly, the Czechoslovak regime succeeded in maintaining a quiescent labor force. What differentiated Polish state-labor relations from those that developed in Mexico and Czechoslovakia was a distinct pattern of intraparty dynamics. Unlike the PRI and the KSČ, the PZPR, throughout its existence, remained deeply torn by factionalism.

The PZPR, like other parties in Eastern Europe, was modeled on the Soviet Communist Party and had a hierarchical, pyramid-like structure. At the lowest level were party cells, or committees organized primarily in places of work, which were responsible for both oversight of workplace activities and for the political indoctrination of employees. Above them were local-level party units, which oversaw all party activities in a given village or city. Next were provincial party organizations, which ensured that the directives flowing from above were implemented by the local and workplace party committees. The Party Congress, which was composed of delegates from all the provinces and met about every four years, was theoretically the most important party institution. In practice, real power was vested in the Central Committee and the Politburo, which met regularly between the Party Congresses and set the policy agenda. Finally, at the very pinnacle of the party was the party’s first secretary. The party was governed internally according to the principle of democratic centralism. This doctrine, developed by Lenin, encouraged discussion and the exchange of views and airing out disagreements during party meetings. However, once a decision was reached, all party members were expected to abide by it, not to question it in public, and to follow through with its implementation. All mass organizations, such as trade unions, youth leagues, and farmers’ associations, were supervised by the party and served as channels for the political mobilization of the public.³⁸

Alongside the party were the state administrative institutions. In theory, the government and its bureaucracy were independent of the party, and the council of ministers was the supreme executive agency. In practice, though, the separation between the party and the government was illusory, since the PZPR was explicitly empowered to provide the direction and maintain oversight over government administration. The hierarchical nature of the party, its presence at all levels of the political system down to village and state firms, as well as its dominance over the state administration, was to provide the PZPR leadership with the resources necessary for maintaining control over society. Nevertheless, in practice, the PZPR struggled to retain its dominance of Polish political life. The history of the PZPR is one of a continued struggle to establish effective control over the society and of continuous, ultimately futile efforts to create an effective, internally cohesive party organization that would enable the leadership to overcome factional struggles.

The party leadership was unable to devise mechanisms for resolving internal party disputes and disagreements and once the initial period of Stalinization was over, few incentives remained in place to reward loyalty to the party while making disloyalty costly. Although on occasion dissenters were expelled from the party, this penalty was applied only sporadically. The divisiveness of the party elite had two distinct but interrelated consequences. In the first place, it made the pursuit of coherent economic policies difficult, because various party factions pushed for different policies, thus contributing to reoccurring economic crises.³⁹ These crises in turn provided a trigger for labor mobilization, further exacerbating tensions within the PZPR. At the same time, the party’s factionalism made it more susceptible to demands put forth by organized labor as party rivals appealed to workers for political backing. In this way, the divisiveness that hindered policy making also provided labor with a favorable opportunity structure for extracting concessions.

Although the party was continually torn by factionalism, the lines of cleavage shifted over time. During the 1950s, the deepest divisions existed between the Moscow-oriented faction, which wanted to replicate the Soviet model as closely as possible, and groups that pushed for a more indigenous road to socialism. The factions clashed for the first time following Stalin’s death, when political repression eased and discussions of democratic reforms came to dominate party meetings. While conservatives sought to preserve Stalinist controls, the nationalist faction pushed for reducing ties with Moscow and for internal political reforms. The conflict came to a head following the brutally suppressed workers’ protest in Poznań in 1956. The nationalist faction emerged victorious from this confrontation. Led by the politically rehabilitated Gomułka, it believed that the PZPR had to extend tangible benefits to social groups in order to consolidate the party’s authority rather than relying primarily on suppressing dissent. This faction sought the support of peasants by advocating an end to the agricultural collectivization program and of the industrial workers by promoting wage increases and promising an improvement in their living standards.⁴⁰

By the late 1960s, as the economy was running into trouble, another faction emerged. Led by first provincial party secretary Gierek, it advocated placing more emphasis on economic modernization. The emergence of this new faction signaled the deepening of internal PZPR conflicts. The conflict intensified with the eruption of workers’ protests in December 1970 in the Baltic cities of Gdańsk and Szczecin that resulted in Gomułka’s downfall. As the three factions battled one another, they sought to augment their political clout by appealing to disaffected social groups. The smallest, and in the end least influential, of these factions sought support among the intelligentsia by promoting political and economic liberalization. Another group, led by Edward Gierek, a party boss from the coal-mining region of Katowice whose power base lay among industrial workers, pushed for a major economic restructuring that would improve living standards. The most serious challenge came from a faction led by Mieczysław Moczar, deputy minister of internal affairs and Central Committee secretary in charge of internal security. This group also appealed to the increasingly dissatisfied workers, but unlike Gierek’s faction, it sought to stir nationalist sentiments and place the blame for Poland’s economic problems on minority groups and Jews in particular.⁴¹ Edward Gierek edged out Moczar and took on the title of first party secretary. Despite taking over the top post, however, he was unable to secure a dominant position within the party and the state apparatus remained deeply divided. The prime minister’s post, for example, went to Piotr Jaroszyński, widely believed to be closely aligned with Moscow.⁴²

Given his still-weak position, Gierek sought to build a broad coalition of support for his policies among the public. Worried about his internal party rivals and having made pledges to disaffected workers that his economic policies would emphasize the supply of badly needed consumer goods, Gierek embarked on a spending spree. Lacking domestic resources, however, he resorted to borrowing from the West to finance growing import bills. Although these policies were aimed at securing workers’ backing for the first secretary, they inadvertently intensified rifts within the party. In particular, the shift away from dependence on the Soviet Union galvanized the conservative faction, for whom reliance on capitalist credit was anathema.⁴³

As tensions within the party mounted, Gierek’s strategy of building his support coalition among industrial workers was proving unsuccessful. After a few years of calm, in 1976 labor protests erupted again. Discussions within the PZPR about an appropriate response to the unrest further exacerbated divisions within the party leadership. The conservative faction called for deploying more repressive measures against the striking workers and their increasingly assertive allies within the intelligentsia. Others within the leadership felt that full-scale repression would be counterproductive at a time when the regime was in the midst of debt-rescheduling negotiations with Western creditors.⁴⁴ Wanting to maintain a decent public image, this faction was therefore receptive to workers’ demands and willing to extend substantive concessions and, in particular, to increase wage levels and consumer subsidies. Once again, internal party factionalism provided labor with an opportunity to expand its resources.

This liberal faction, however, thought that wage increases were at best a temporary solution and sought new strategies for extricating Poland from the growing economic crisis. To this end, it encouraged various groups within the party to explore possible reforms. In November 1978 a midlevel party group called Experience and Future was created to serve as a forum for examining potential reform strategies. Soon the group began publishing the results of its discussions, including calls for “reduced censorship, economic decentralization, limitation of the party’s role, revitalization of representative organs and a new relationship between the rulers and the ruled.”⁴⁵ Not surprisingly, these ideas exacerbated conflicts within the party leadership.

The conservatives were not the only PZPR leaders concerned about the group’s proposals. Although the liberal faction was interested in reforms, it was not prepared to endorse these suggestions and withdrew its support for the forum. Nonetheless, responding to the growing support among the party’s rank and file for implementing changes within the party, a number of Politburo members, and in particular Stafan Bratkowski and Stefan Olszowski, continued promoting the group’s activities. More ominously for Gierek, in 1979 Olszowski began encouraging opposition figures to more forcefully criticize the party and helped provincial party leaders mount a letter-writing campaign criticizing Gierek’s leadership.⁴⁶

By early 1980, party meetings were increasingly raucous affairs. No longer willing to toe the party line, rank-and-file members began voicing open criticism of the leadership. Most criticized were the constant food shortages; the lack of accurate information about domestic economic and political developments; and the absence of any genuine representation of workers’ interests at the enterprise level, where workers viewed both the workers’ councils and trade unions as part of the management structure.⁴⁷ Dissident leaders quickly seized on the growing discontent among the PZPR rank and file. Some regime opponents began making direct appeals to party members and encouraged them to push for reforms from within the party.

By the summer of 1980, the PZPR was faced with an unprecedented challenge to its authority. As had also happened earlier, tensions within the party set off a vicious cycle. It made policy making more difficult, thus hindering crafting of responses to the economic crisis. The deepening economic crisis, in turn, sparked popular protests that further exacerbated factionalism with the PZPR. Growing factionalism then made it easier for labor to extract concessions from the regime.

Although the debates within the party were new and focused primarily on how to respond to Solidarity, the lines of cleavage reflected the long-standing differences between the conservative and the liberal, or “nationalist,” factions. These divisions permeated all levels of the party apparatus from the Politburo to local offices. The splits immobilized the party, with most factions taking a wait-and-see attitude rather than responding to the growing public anger. The Solidarity period thus further exacerbated internal struggles within the PZPR.

The disunity and factionalism of the PZPR had far-reaching consequences for its effectiveness as a political party. During the Gomułka period, fear of showing party disunity led to strict control over information that was presented to the public and of communication within the party itself. The circle around Gomułka was concerned that open debate and discussion of policy options, instead of providing an opportunity to devise new and better strategies, would expose the thinly suppressed rifts within the party and the government and thus result in the weakening of social control. As Bielasiak notes, “On the one hand, these factions neutralized one another; on the other, hostility among them escalated. Since balancing these various factions tended to lead to no decisions at all on important issues—for fear that any innovation would damage the fragile ‘checks and balances’ system—social and economic problems were ignored and popular dissatisfaction increased.”⁴⁸ Furthermore, although the power hierarchy was nominally well defined within the party and the government structures, the conflicts among party leadership led to weakened control over regional party centers. Local leaders, cognizant of the center’s weakness, formed alliances to promote their own economic and political objectives and played various central factions off against one another to achieve these local goals.⁴⁹

As the regional centers increasingly pursued their own policies without informing and often in contradiction of the center’s directives, Gomułka, uncertain of other party bosses’ support, increasingly bypassed institutional structures of the state. Toward the end of the 1960s the PZPR Politburo and the Central Committee for all intents and purposes stopped functioning as policy-making bodies. Most decisions were made by Gomułka and his closest advisors, without consultation with either the state or the party apparatus. The Politburo, nominally the highest policy-making body, was often unaware of directives being sent to the regional centers, while the provinces implemented Gomułka’s instructions selectively.⁵⁰

The PZPR leadership was aware that the constant factional battles undermined its ability to govern effectively and made it more vulnerable to workers’ demands, and on a number of occasions the party initiated internal structural reforms. The first round of these came after the 1956 workers’ demonstrations, with the party’s abandoning the repressive policies of the Stalinist era and shifting to a strategy of providing positive incentives to encourage and maintain public support. The most ambitious restructuring took place following the December 1970 clashes between the regime and striking workers. Gomułka, along with a number of other high-level party officials, was expelled from the party. Other leaders resigned on their own, taking personal responsibility for the crisis.⁵¹ Gierek’s faction, however, believed that the crisis was caused by more than poor judgment on the part of individual leaders and could be traced to the deterioration of effective channels of communication with the public. In their view the party no longer functioned as a political-mobilization organization and was increasingly alienated from society. Over the following two years, an animated discussion continued within the party about how best to establish constant and effective dialogue with social groups.⁵²

As a result of these debates the Central Committee decided to expel from the PZPR those who belonged to the party for reasons other than political conviction. Unlike previously, when the party was primarily interested in expanding membership rolls, now it emphasized member quality rather than quantity. Extensive interviews were conducted with almost 50 percent of the party membership and an was effort made to improve member qualifications through more intensive political training and education. Finally, new internal party information and communication channels were put in place. The goal was to create a more coherent organization with new incentives to promote loyalty to the party and make it less susceptible to factionalism.

Improving the quality of party cadres was also designed to facilitate the reestablishment of the “party’s leading role” within society. The party expected its staff at the provincial and enterprise-level committees to now become active promoters and educators of the party’s political ideology, although how exactly they were to go about this was never made clear.⁵³ In particular, the party renewed its commitment to establishing better communication with workers, especially those employed in the large industrial enterprises, with the goal of enticing more workers to join the PZPR. Attracting more workers into the party was a priority because by the early 1970s, although the party claimed to be a representative of the proletariat, the percentage of workers and peasants within its ranks was dwindling.

The next step in the far-reaching restructuring of the party-state apparatus was administrative reform. The new leadership believed that without putting an end to the factionalism of the Gomułka tenure it would be difficult to jump-start the economy.⁵⁴ The middle-level administrative units, the county (powiaty) committees, which previously exercised strong control over state administration, were eliminated and the number of provinces increased from twenty-two to forty-nine. Although the party argued that increasing the number of provinces was a way to decentralize administrative functions and bring citizens closer to the policy-making process, from Gierek’s perspective a more crucial goal was to undercut the power of the provincial bosses. However, the two goals turned out to be incompatible. Gierek, interested primarily in consolidating his power, pushed the reforms through rapidly, with little preparation. Consequently, rather than professionalizing the administrative apparatus, the immediate result of the administrative reform was a very high turnover of staff and the loss of many experienced cadres with personal knowledge and established relationships with local social groups.⁵⁵

Ironically, Gierek’s attempt to attract and promote more qualified administrators exacerbated tensions within the party because it resulted in members of the nomenklatura gaining additional privileges and security of employment.⁵⁶ The proprietorial attitude toward occupied posts and the lack of effective control by the central leadership meant that over the course of the 1970s members of the nomenklatura began to engage in increasingly corrupt practices and more conspicuous consumption, which fostered growing public resentment.

One of the reasons for the lackluster results of the reform effort was that the internal party incentive structure remained intact. That is, the lack of sanctions for disloyalty to the PZPR continued to plague the party. Although following leadership turnovers individual high-level party officers would be removed from positions of power and sometimes expelled from the party itself, such punishment was rarely meted out on a wider scale. Regional party bosses who at best ignored party directives and often promoted policies at odds with those directives remained in office and continued to build up independent power bases. Even those who openly challenged the party leadership were not penalized.

The period between the emergence of Solidarity and the transition to democracy nine years later had the most far-reaching consequences for the relationship between the party and organized labor. During this period, party factionalism intensified and the deepening economic crisis meant that the PZPR was increasingly forced to turn to procedural concessions to satisfy labor demands. Furthermore, unlike during previous rounds of conflict between the state and labor, by the 1980s the PZPR no longer had the material resources to abrogate procedural concessions once the immediate conflict was over by providing additional substantive concessions, as it had done in the preceding decades.

The worker mobilization that began in the summer of 1980 was triggered, as were previous such eruptions, by price increases, which were a part of an austerity package. Solidarity’s unprecedented challenge to the PZPR’s authority further deepened and publicly exposed internal party divisions. The main cleavages appeared between those pushing for far-reaching decentralization and liberalization of the party and state administration and saw in Solidarity a potential ally; those advocating taking a hard-line approach to the challenge posed by the Solidarity movement and who wanted to eliminate it, by force if necessary; and finally, those who wanted to implement some reforms but remained concerned about the politically destabilizing impact of Solidarity.⁵⁷