The shipyard nurse who, when the regime declared the strike over, held workers back and turned it into a solidarity strike
"You betrayed them. Now the authorities will crush us like bedbugs." To Wałęsa, the moment he declared the strike over.
A nurse at the Gdańsk Lenin Shipyard, she joined the founding of the Free Trade Unions of the Coast (WZZ) in 1978 and wrote for its underground paper The Coastal Worker on workplace safety and occupational disease, becoming one of the most determined opposition activists on the Baltic coast. On 16 August 1980, after management granted pay rises and Wałęsa declared the strike over, Pienkowska and Anna Walentynowicz physically blocked the shipyard gates and appealed to workers not to abandon the other factories that had joined them in solidarity, turning a local settlement into a movement-wide solidarity strike. Her intervention made the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee (MKS) possible; she drafted demand number 16 on healthcare reform among the Twenty-One Demands and became a signatory of the Gdańsk Agreement on 31 August.
Career Timeline
- 1978Co-founded WZZ, edited underground paper Robotnik Wybrzeża
- 1980.08.14–16Shipyard strike: handled external communications, decisive role in continuing the strike
- 1980.08.17–31MKS Presidium member, co-drafted 21 Demands, signed Gdańsk Agreement
- 1980–1981National chair, Solidarity Health Service Section
- 1981.12–1982.07Interned under martial law
- 1982–1989Underground Solidarity work, aid to victims of repression
- 1991–1993Senator for Gdańsk
- 1998–2002Gdańsk city councillor