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State, Labor, and the Transition to a Market Economy. Agnieszka Paczyńska
Читать онлайн.Название State, Labor, and the Transition to a Market Economy
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780271069968
Автор произведения Agnieszka Paczyńska
Жанр Учебная литература
Издательство Ingram
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