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Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, Vol. 1 No. 1, March–April 1977, pp. 9–10.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The main facts about what happened on June 24th and 25th, 1976, became quickly known in the West. On the afternoon of June 24th an unscheduled item appeared on the agenda of the Sejm, the Polish Parliament. It concerned a hitherto unpublished Government proposal on prices. The Prime Minister rose to announce the proposal and, after a brief discussion, Politburo member Edward Babiuch spoke indicating the Deputies’ acceptance of the proposed measures. That evening, a Thursday, the Prime Minister announced the package to the nation on television. The aim was to hold discussions about the new policies with workers arriving at the factories the next morning and then implement the measures the following Monday. But throughout Friday 25th, widespread strikes and sit-ins were launched by workers across the country and in some places, particularly the towns of Ursus and Radom, stormy demonstrations took place. In the face of this movement the Prime Minister returned to the television studios on Friday evening and cancelled the new measures. As the day ended some hundreds of people were arrested in various towns.
The government measures which had produced such a dramatic response had involved steep increases in the prices of many kinds of food – the Morning Star estimated a 70% increase in the cost of food (December 6,1976). Price increases of some sort had been expected for at least six months, but the population had not been led to expect such a massive increase. Some compensation in the form of wage increases was also announced, but these increases would not meet the population’s extra costs and were graded so that the amounts of compensation grew larger the higher a person’s income was. Finally the package involved increases in the prices paid by the state for agricultural products bought from private peasants and increases of a similar scale, on raw materials bought by the peasants from the state.
About these facts there is no dispute. But there is a major disagreement within the Left press in Britain over the Polish government’s subsequent handling of the workers involved in the strikes and demonstrations. Most papers on the Left have claimed that the Polish authorities responded to the working class movement with severe measures of repression. But the most extensive report of the situation in Poland – a series of 5 articles by Bill Brooks in the Morning Star – sharply contradicts this allegation. A number of letters in Tribune have also backed his claims.
Bill Brooks makes many valid points about the economic and social development that has taken place in Poland since the end of the war. At the same time he makes a number of critical remarks on the June price measures. He says that the authorities misjudged the views of the population over the price measures; he stresses the unpopularity of the proposal that the higher paid should get larger compensatory wage increases than the lower paid. And he points out in the fourth article of the series (which in some respects contradicts the bland comments in his first article) that the works councils and the official trade unions completely failed to take up the workers’ grievances over the measures.
But the striking feature of all these criticisms is that they had already been made soon after the June events by the Polish government itself. Both Party leader Edward Gierek and Prime Minister Jaroszewicz re-iterated a number of times that such errors had accompanied the June proposals. What the Polish leadership have strenuously denied is that there has been any victimisation of workers for going on strike or for demonstrating and that there has been any undue brutality on the part of the police. And on these matters also, the Brooks series echoes official Polish pronouncements. He simply re-states the government’s assertions that ‘no Polish worker had been arrested and punished in any way for taking part in strikes and demonstrations’. He also maintains complete silence on the issues of police brutality and mass sackings.
This statement has now been contradicted by a mass of documentary information from Poland. The information comes mainly from a body set up in September 1976 in Warsaw called the Workers Defence Committee (KOR). The 23 members of the Committee are mainly prominent Polish intellectuals. Some, like Edward Lipinski, Ludwik Cohn, Antoni Pajdak and Aniela Steinsbergowa are socialists who belonged to the Polish Socialist Party before it fused with the Polish Communists in 1948. Others like Jacek Kuron – well known in the West for his Marxist Open Letter to the Polish Communist Party in the 1960s – Antoni Macierewicz, Piotr Naimski and Wojciech Zlembinski were active in the student movement for greater democratic freedoms that was crushed by the Gomulka government in the spring of 1968. The KOR also includes the Polish writer Jerzy Andrzewjewski, who wrote the book from which the film Ashes and Diamonds was made, and the Polish actress Halina Mikolajska.
The KOR set out to investigate cases of victimisation of workers for their activities in June, to publicise the results of these investigations and to gain material, legal and political support for victims of repression. The information collected by the Committee has been circulated in a number of communiques from the KOR and in information bulletins produced by Warsaw supporters of the KOR. In the documentary section of Labour Focus we reproduce a small proportion of the documents from Poland which have not so far been published in English.
The picture that emerges from this documentary evidence is one of very considerable repression against the workers most actively involved in the June strikes in various parts of Poland. The most blatant forms taken by this repression have been the actions of the police and the judicial authorities. But in some ways more significant has been the sacking of well over one thousand workers – some estimates go very much higher – in various parts of Poland, including the Baltic port of Gdansk, Ursus and Radom. The exact scope of these political sackings is impossible to discover, but their national application is shown by the fact that individual industrial ministries issued memoranda encouraging such sackings after the June events. The information bulletin put out by supporters of the Warsaw KOR in September 1976 quotes one of these memoranda issued by the Minister for the Engineering Industry, dated 17th July, 1976, reference No.P.P.Il.5201/76. It reads: ‘The wilful stoppage of work without valid reason, the shirking of one’s duties, and the disturbance of order and peace in the Institution are a basis for termination of contract without notice, i.e. for dismissal from work with immediate effect’.
The seriousness of such sackings as a way of attacking working class families can be appreciated when we remember that the Party and state authorities can enforce their will on every single plant in the country, ensuring that sacked workers are not re-employed. Thus, at least into September the Department of Employment in Warsaw was refusing even to interview workers who had been sacked after the June events.
It is of the greatest importance that trade unions in this country should join in the protests already made by the Italian Communist Party and various other continental political and trade union organisations against this repression of working class people in Poland. Telegrams should be sent to the Polish Embassy demanding the release of all those still in jail for activity during the June events and demanding the re-instatement of sacked workers. Donations should also be made by trade union bodies to the Workers’ Defence Committee fund to assist the families of jailed or sacked workers.
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