The Politics of Work, Workplace and Community in Nowa Huta, Poland

This paper explores the relationship between work, workplace and community politics in the town of Nowa Huta in southern Poland. Nowa Huta is a town that was constructed, around a major industrial plant (the Lenin Steelworks), as central to the socialist project in Poland, but was also critical to events leading to the collapse of that project. The focus of the paper lies in considering the relationship between local workers and labour unions (especially Solidarity) and community organisations such as churches, other dissident movements and local government bodies in the construction, contestation and collapse of socialism in Poland. Using archive materials and stories from interviews in Nowa Huta, the paper narrates and analyses key events in the town’s history and examines the relationship between the steelworks and the wider community. It explores how both internal and external representations of the community were structured by its particular historical development and by the labour politics of late-communist Poland. It concludes by discussing the post-1989 period of Nowa Huta’s history and interrogating the changing relationship between workplace and community politics, noting that the close relationship of earlier periods has been somewhat broken down by economic and employment change.

Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers, Pittsburgh, 4th-8th April 2000

A copy of this paper in PDF format can be downloaded here.