Podcast: Stories From The Eastern West #27 - SHIPYARD

How freedom and democracy broke out at a Polish shipyard, ten years before the fall of communism.
In August 1980, after the firing of popular shipyard worker, Anna Walentynowicz, a strike broke out at the Vladimir Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk. Suddenly this massive complex on the Polish coast, with 16,000 employees and of huge strategic importance for the Polish economy, was under worker occupation, and every day other workplaces in Gdańsk and around the country started joining in.
Very soon the communist leadership in Warsaw realised that this wasn't just another strike they could snuff out with promised pay rises, or indeed by force. As for the shipyard workers, they realised that this was a chance to force the government to accept something they had long been fighting for… trade unions that were independent from the state, and run by the workers themselves…
More about the episode at Culture.pl:
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Episode Credits:
Written & produced by Peter Wolodzko
Edited by Wojtek Oleksiak & Adam Zulawski
Hosted by Nitzan Reisner, Adam Zulawski
Scoring & sound design by Wojciech Oleksiak
Stories from the Eastern West is a podcast from Culture.pl telling little-known histories from Central & Eastern Europe that changed our world. It was brought to you by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.