A party official who contained crisis through concessions
On 22 August 1980, he accepted the strikers' demands in writing, formally opening negotiations between the government and the Gdańsk Inter-Factory Strike Committee.
Mieczysław Jagielski was a communist party and economic official of the Polish People's Republic, associated with agricultural policy and state planning. As strikes spread in 1980, he represented the government first in settling the July movement in Lublin and then in Gdańsk, where he signed the agreement that recognized independent trade unions. His career captures a regime trying to contain social demands through limited concessions, only to confront organized worker representation in public.
Activities and affiliations
- 1970–1981 Economy, finance and planning · Poland
Career Timeline
- 1946–1949Official, Union of Peasant Self-Help
- 1953–1956Head of the Central Committee Agriculture Department, PZPR
- 1959–1970Minister of Agriculture
- 1970–1981Deputy Prime Minister of the Polish People's Republic
- 1971–1975Chairman of the Planning Commission of the Council of Ministers
- 1971–1981Member of the PZPR Politburo
- 1980Government negotiator in the Lublin July strikes and Gdańsk August talks
- 1980–1981Government signatory to the Gdańsk Agreement
Related historical events
From planning chief to crisis manager, 1971-1981
Jagielski gave up the agriculture ministry when he became a deputy prime minister in 1970, and in December 1971 he was promoted to full membership of the party Politburo, moving into the centre of economic policy. That same month he took over as chairman of the Planning Committee of the Council of Ministers, and from 1971 to 1981 he also served as Poland's permanent representative to Comecon in Moscow. He is described as having exercised a profound influence on Polish economic policy in this period, leading the planning apparatus through the early-1970s, debt-financed growth strategy of Edward Gierek's leadership.
After suffering a severe heart attack in October 1975, however, he lost the chairmanship of the Planning Committee. As the crisis deepened he became chairman of the Council of Ministers' Economy Committee in February 1981, but with national income falling from 1979 onward he had to move between extended rationing, price increases and Solidarity's demands. The Lublin negotiations of July 1980 and the Gdańsk negotiations that August, both of which he led for the government as strikes spread, unfolded against this economic background.
At a Politburo meeting on 10 June 1981 he offered his own resignation from the Politburo and from the deputy premiership, saying that there had been a certain incident in his life, apparently referring to his recent heart attack. The offer was rebuffed, and on 31 July 1981 he was dismissed from the deputy premiership, reportedly because he had failed to produce a recovery programme for the economic crisis. That same month he also left the Politburo, the Central Committee and the Economy Committee. The flexibility he showed at the negotiating table was not separate from his responsibility as a planning official, and the method of managing crisis through concessions ended in 1981 with his own removal.