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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
Underground union work and state repression
Walentynowicz joined the Free Trade Unions of the Coast (WZZ) in 1978 and, as editor of the underground paper Robotnik Wybrzeża, distributed an illegal newsheet inside the shipyard. Her flat served as a WZZ contact point, which brought surveillance by the Security Service, 48-hour detentions and house searches.
She was repeatedly a target of state violence. Her dismissal in August 1980 came five months before her retirement, on the pretext of a 'major infraction of worker's responsibilities.' After Solidarity was founded she co-organized the shipyard strike under martial law and was detained, interned until July 1982, then arrested again and held in prisons in Gdańsk, Mokotów and Grudziądz. In March 1983 the Grudziądz court sentenced her to one year and three months' imprisonment with a three-year suspension; that December she was arrested again for taking part in an attempt to install a plaque commemorating the 'Wujek' mine massacre, and was held in the Lubliniec prison until April 1984. In total she spent nineteen months in detention and prison.
The most dramatic episode came in October 1981 in Radom. During a meeting with workers, two security-police officers, in collaboration with an informant, attempted to poison her. Poland's Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) later charged those involved in 2009, and the case went to court in 2010, but the defendants were acquitted in both the first and the second instance. After leading a hunger strike in 1985 to protest the murder of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, she returned all the state decorations she had received.