Solidarity, ‘Solidarity’ and the Challenges of Transformation: Restructuring Labour and Community in Post-Socialist Poland

This paper explores the changing roles of labour organisations in mediating, shaping and supporting industrial restructuring and economic transformation in post-socialist Poland. The focus is on the local experiences of labour and community change in Nowa Huta, a steel town in southern Poland, though it will build upon wider issues of union reorganisation in contemporary east central Europe. The paper investigates the role of labour organisations in Nowa Huta in building alliances with other local institutions (e.g. the state, the church), managing a diversity of interests and confronting the consequences of job loss in the community. Particular attention will be paid to Solidarity, exploring, amongst other things, the ways in which it reconciles its national role in government with its local role as a workplace union and deals with the reduction of its core membership through mass redundancy. These issues are considered in the historical context of Solidarity’s spatial, rather than sectoral, development and the critical role that Solidarity played in bringing down socialism in Poland.

Paper presented to the Annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers, New York, 28th Feb.- 3rd March 2001

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