From fired shipyard worker to 'mother of independent Poland'
On the strike's third day, after Wałęsa declared it over, she and Alina Pienkowska blocked the gates and turned the workers back, transforming a pay dispute into a solidarity strike.
A crane operator at the Gdańsk Lenin Shipyard whose dismissal in August 1980 set off the strike that became Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Eastern Bloc. She worked sixteen years as a welder, exceeded 270% of her output quota and was honored as a Hero of Socialist Labor, but after publicly accusing a supervisor of embezzling the workers' fund she faced secret-police harassment and became an open dissident. On the strike's third day, after Wałęsa declared it over, she and Alina Pienkowska ran to turn the workers back from the gates and transformed a pay dispute into a solidarity strike. She later broke with Wałęsa, denouncing his 'cult of personality' and the union's drift from its founding ideals, and died in the 2010 Smolensk air crash.
Career Timeline
- 1950Joined the Gdańsk Lenin Shipyard, working sixteen years as a welder before becoming a crane operator
- 1968Denounced a supervisor's embezzlement of the workers' fund; her whole department defended her against dismissal
- 1978Co-founded the Free Trade Unions of the Coast (WZZ) and edited the underground paper Robotnik Wybrzeża
- 1980-08-07Dismissed for illegal union activity, five months before retirement
- 1980-08-14Her firing ignited the Gdańsk strike; served on the MKS presidium and signed the August Agreement
- 1980-09Member of the presidium of the NSZZ Solidarity founding committee
- 1981-12Co-organized the shipyard strike after martial law, then spent nineteen months in internment and prison
- 1990Returned briefly to the shipyard, retired in 1991, and kept criticizing Wałęsa and post-Solidarity politics