1952–2002
○ Natural causes
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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
Leading the health-service union, 1980-1982
As the August 1980 action widened into a solidarity strike, Pienkowska chaired the strike committee at the shipyard's industrial health service clinics, and after the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee dissolved itself following the Gdańsk Agreement of 31 August she kept organizing in the health sector. On 1 September 1980 the strike committee became the Inter-Enterprise Founding Committee of the independent self-governing unions (the name Solidarity was adopted on 17 September); Pienkowska took the chair of the Health Service Section and sat on the committee's presidium in Gdańsk. From the autumn of 1980 she headed the National Health Service Section of Solidarity, remaining based in the shipyard clinic.
On 7 November 1980, 120 representatives of Solidarity's health service negotiated with the government side at the Gdańsk Voivodeship Office, chiefly over pay. No agreement was reached, the unionists broke off the talks and, seizing the Heraldry Room in the building, proclaimed an occupation strike. Pienkowska became head of the Health Service Strike Committee and later headed Solidarity's health service. The strike lasted ten days and, like other union activity in Solidarity's first months, enjoyed public support along the coast; numerous institutions and enterprises declared solidarity with the health workers' demands. Social pressure proved effective: the health service obtained "the possibility of further negotiations of demands along with a sizable, per person pay raise".
At the second sitting of the Gdańsk regional congress in November 1981 she resigned from the regional board, having grown increasingly critical of the union leadership's conduct. When martial law was declared on 13 December 1981 she was interned; the internment was lifted on 23 July 1982. After her release she continued to work in the underground structures of Solidarity, with health issues remaining the practical axis of her activity.
This period is distinct from the symbolic moment of August. Pienkowska overlapped her identity as a nurse with her role as a union organizer, treating the conditions of health workers and the functioning and accessibility of medical care as two sides of the same set of demands. What the November 1980 occupation strike won was the organizational continuation of the concerns she had written into demand 16 of the Twenty-One Demands.