Between solid and liquid experience in a socialist port: Gdańsk shipyard workers at the turn of the 1980s

I

Almost every inhabitant of the Gdańsk Coast (Wybrzeże Gdańskie) had a family member or close friend who worked in a shipyard. Together, the shipyards on the Gdańsk coast – Gdańsk Shipyard (Stocznia Gdańska), Gdynia Shipyard (Stocznia Gdynia), Gdańsk Shiprepair Yard (Stocznia Remontowa), Northern Shipyard (Stocznia Północna), and some other minor facilities – hired seven out of 10 industrial workers in the Gdańsk Voivodship and were responsible for two-thirds of total shipbuilding production in Poland. Even though during the 1970s, huge new industrial facilities (Northern Port, Gdańsk Refinery, and ‘Fosfory’, a fertilizer plant) were built, Gdańsk Shipyard alone, with 16,000 employees by August 1980, remained one of the largest employers. ³ Founded in the post-war period as a result of the merger of the Danziger Werft and the Schichau-Werft Danzig, it quickly became a major employer at the socialist port. The implementation of novel technologies enabled the assembly of modern vessels, some of which were sold abroad, first to the Soviet Union and later to other countries. In the 1960s, Gdańsk Shipyard produced freezer trawlers, factory ships, general cargo and semi-container vessels, and signed its first contracts with Western countries. ⁴ The then popular catchphrase, ‘The sea feeds and makes people rich’ (Morze żywi i bogaci), accurately described the impact the shipyards and maritime economy had on many lives on the Gdańsk Coast. Simultaneously, the contrasts at the socialist port between a yearning for the simple, ‘solid’ existence of the state socialist economy and the mutual aspirations to achieve greater material success achievable in the ‘liquid’ existence of the port produced a hotbed of discontent that led to the mass protests in December 1970 and August 1980.

This article explores the working conditions and everyday experience of Gdańsk Shipyard’s workers in the context of the socialist port. The metaphor used in the title has two meanings. First, it emphasizes a spatial contrast – how work in a shipyard combined a ‘liquid’ experience of the maritime economy with a ‘solid’ experience of the industrial interior. Second, it points to a temporal contrast; that is, the crisis of post-war ‘solid modernity’ arising from the global changes that have marked production, employment and trade in the shipbuilding industry since the 1970s in both capitalist and state-socialist economies. ⁵ I argue that shipyard workers were a prime example of the permeation of ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ experience. It can be seen on the local level as conflicting pressures of various groups in the socialist port, but also on the central level as a state socialist experience of being global on the one hand and managing the insubordinate port city on the other.

The contradictions between the ‘solidity’ and ‘liquidity’ of the socialist port also shed light on the very roots of the August 1980 strike and the creation of the Solidarity movement. ⁶ The strike began at Gdańsk Shipyard, briefly resembling many other workers’ demonstrations that had occurred in Poland since the end of the war, including protests by shipyard workers in December 1970. Anna Walentynowicz, a gantry crane operator, had begun to work in the shipyard during the Stalinist years. In August 1980, when she was fired due to her oppositional activities, she stood out as one of the longest-serving employees at Gdańsk Shipyard. The call for her reinstatement became the chief demand of the strike. For Walentynowicz personally, the dismissal was a blow. Even though the job was hard, Gdańsk Shipyard, with its conducive atmosphere, had become her real home. ⁷ Her position in the shipyard was exceptional, not just because she was a female worker, but also because of her dedication to one plant, an attitude already rare in the 1980s. While staff called for wage raises and the reinstatement of Anna Walentynowicz, the demonstration soon morphed into a strike of solidarity with other workplaces. It was a real breakthrough because, from then on, shipyard workers became advocates for the whole country, and in their 21 Demands called on the rulers to revive socialism by taking the measures necessary to improve living conditions and governance. It was particularly important because the second half of the 1970s was a time of general despair in the daily lives of millions of Poles, discontent triggered by growing inequality and injustices, difficulties in the development of the backward Polish economy, and concerns about a rise in foreign debt. The Interfactory Strike Committee, composed of delegates heavily involved in the strike and the dissidents, soon began to set the conditions and pressured the rulers to enter into negotiations at Gdańsk Shipyard. The signing of the Gdańsk Agreement was a great achievement due to the resulting willingness of both parties to fulfil the demands, including postulate no. 1 on the creation of an independent trade union, which was subsequently called ‘Solidarity’. Its name was not accidental. In demonstrating solidarity with other striking workforces, the shipyard workers managed to go beyond individual experience and to incorporate different, sometimes conflicting, pressures and expectations. During the two-week strike, Gdańsk Shipyard formed a sort of agora to which representatives of hundreds of workplaces came from miles around to put all hands on deck. The role of shipyard workers in this process was indispensable, since they were able to serve successfully the needs of multiple social groups, which, as I aim to demonstrate, were also the product of the dual nature of their work – between the solidity of the industrial occupation and the liquidity of the socialist port. However, while the shipyard workers were on everyone’s lips in August 1980, their fame quickly subsided, overshadowed by the influence of the Solidarity Trade Union. The latest heroes were subjected to a number of intense and prolonged crises in the 1980s.

Gdańsk was made popular by the strikes of the 1980s, resulting in the formation of Solidarity, which this article views from the perspective of the structural developments and conflicts that contributed to these events. Drawing upon the reports of the Polish United Workers Party (PUWP), the shipbuilding trade press (Głos Stoczniowca weekly) and personal accounts, the paper explores patterns of various global, national and local impacts that led to such a crisis – from the development of a shipyard in the socialist port to its dramatic collapse during late state socialism.

II

From the very outset, socialist ports provided additional incentives to anyone willing to take risks, and Gdańsk was no exception in this regard. After the war, the Nowy Port district (literally ‘new port’), adjacent to Gdańsk shipyards, was a popular place, with its pubs, smuggling and prostitutes (called seagulls, mewy), and streets where many languages were heard. A steady stream of contraband goods, but also fugitives fleeing to the West, passed through it. ⁸ The socialist port offered freedoms and possibilities about which inhabitants of the interior could only dream. This, in turn, moved the central authorities, who made every effort to control places of dissent, to respond immediately. Hence, the socialist port was the site of a constant clash of freedom with surveillance. The earliest such clash was the longshoremen’s strike in Nowy Port in 1946, during which several hundred port employees called for better pay, overdue food rations, an end to the recent evictions and the re-hiring of colleagues who had been fired due to thefts in port warehouses. The rebellion triggered a violent response on the part of the government, which surrounded the district with military forces and crushed the demonstrators, and in reprisal continued evictions, liquidated port pubs and declared the border zone in Nowy Port to be under special control. ⁹ De-Stalinization in the mid-1950s, in turn, brought about a weakening of state control over the socialist port, which resulted in a further rise in contraband. As Jerzy Kochanowski notes, the final prevalence of freedoms in a socialist port was facilitated by state socialism itself, which turned a blind eye because both legal and illegal imports supplemented existing shortages in the socialist economy and generated affluence. ¹⁰

Containerisation in port cities such as New York, Yokohama, Sydney and Bremen significantly decreased the time ships spent in ports thanks to the new large-scale container vessels and handling methods. Hence, the historical city port with jetties disappeared, unable to operate as container ships were too large to lie at its quays. Consequently, the port city was cut off from port life. ¹¹ In Central and Eastern Europe, containerisation arrived with a break, as none of the socialist ports had been a pioneer of modern transport. ¹² Gdynia launched an experiment and inaugurated some containerisation on the Gdańsk Coast in the 1970s. In Gdańsk, the modernisation of the port in the first half of the 1970s, especially the opening of the Northern Port, which diverted some of the heavy traffic beyond the historical port, enabled some growth in capacity, but a container terminal was lacking. In the early 1980s, as a result of Poland’s difficulty in maintaining a favourable balance of payments, coal exports and crude oil imports dropped, and this affected the entire port of Gdańsk, whose turnover declined by more than one-half. ¹³ Nowy Port lost much of its former entourage. Foreign seafarers, dollars and wealth were seen more frequently in the city centre, while the port itself remained separate from the city. ¹⁴

The socialist port appeared to be a hub of affluent lives, with income differences that were considerably greater than anywhere else in Poland. Among maritime workers, seafarers and fishermen, and – to a lesser extent – longshoremen were regarded as a port city elite. ¹⁵ Seafarers earned more than the national average, but it was primarily a dollar company perk, given the dollar’s exorbitant value on the grey market, which worked in their favour. Moreover, through extensive private import of foreign goods that were subsequently traded via legal or illegal outlets, seafarers could significantly alleviate the difficulties of the shortage economy and quickly enrich themselves. For example, in the late 1960s, each of the 24 seafarers aboard the Wirek Mine, who had spent 3-4 dollars in Spain for a ton of garlic and smuggled it into Poland, earned around 10,000 Polish złoty – that is, the equivalent of a few months’ salary for an industrial worker. ¹⁶ Luxury prostitutes, port thieves and moneychangers were also privileged, along with fishermen and longshoremen. Other groups such as local and central PUWP leaders, intelligentsia, artists and tourists, not necessarily directly linked to the port, could also benefit from their proximity to the sea. Finally, some entrepreneurs (pursuing what was known in state socialism as ‘private initiative’, inicjatywa prywatna), who ran successful enterprises on the fringes of the state socialist planned economy and could afford a single-family house, were seen as unfairly privileged. ¹⁷ All these groups, intertwined, created a mesh unknown outside Gdańsk and neighbouring Sopot and Gdynia.

The proximity of such a joyous existence and grey market enterprise gave rise to resentment and envy on the part of those who could not benefit. A team of PUWP experts, assigned to explain the grounds for the Gdańsk Coast strike in December 1970, wrote about this facet of the socialist port:

There is a tight connection between [. . .] phenomena of criminal and foreign exchange activities, a range of interactions between seafarers and the “Western way of life”, and the presence of a large environment of private wealth and the demoralizing influence of this state of affairs and lifestyle [. . .] on some younger ones, particularly the less well-off. ¹⁸

Unlike seafarers, shipbuilders never visited high-end hotels or called exclusive prostitutes, and they used public transport instead of ordering a taxi. ¹⁹ Local entrepreneurs, portrayed as embezzlers who, thanks to a range of connections, dubious transactions and misappropriation, became wealthy at the expense of the working class, were especially disliked by the young shipyard workers, even more so than the privileged PUWP apparatus. ²⁰

In the spring of 1971, Jacek Wejroch, a journalist travelling to the Gdańsk Coast, wrote: ‘No one is interested in shipyard workers or port workers – there are many of them, they are ordinary, they live like other people, [and] they belong to the land [. . .].’ ²¹ They represented the socialist port, but without arousing the resentment that other groups did through their exuberant consumption. Regardless of the charm of the socialist port, the same jobs in the shipyard resembled the everyday existence of industrial workers in other ‘interior’ branches. Most shipyard workers were fitters, welders, blacksmiths, locksmiths, carpenters, painters, electricians and machine operators, who could just as easily have worked at other plants. ²²

The work was hard, both in the hall and outdoors on the hull, causing numerous occupational diseases such as bronchitis, pneumoconiosis and hearing damage. Operations were marked by significant difficulty and a large number of injuries, combined with a great deal of responsibility that caused additional stress. ²³ Writer Janusz Głowacki, who was at Gdańsk Shipyard in August 1980, depicted the yard’s mundane realities in the novel Moc truchleje. The main character, a young shipyard worker, exploited on a regular basis by employers and the PUWP apparatus, endured his everyday struggles: ‘I am hanging onto the scaffolding in a shrunken position, choosing to weld closer to the dock, which has a plus side if I fall asleep and fall, and the downside is that hot slag is dropping on my head from those working above.’ ²⁴ The low degree of mechanization, the assembly production and collaboration with external parties on a daily basis brought about much irregularity – piecework, late shifts and overtime. This in turn led to chronic fatigue and stress. ²⁵

Shipbuilders and coal miners had a lot in common. Both were products of ‘solid modernity’ – beneficiaries of new investments in heavy industry, educational and material advancement, and state welfare. Both were honoured in state propaganda and officially celebrated on dedicated days – ‘Miner’s Day’ on 4 December and ‘Shipbuilder’s Day’ on 29 June. Pits and ports were connected by the Coal Trunk Line, one of the country’s most important railroads, built in the 1930s to transport the coal loads from Upper Silesia to Gdynia. The miners, however, were a lot more privileged. In the 1970s, coal mining industries in many regions of the West underwent a harmful transition intended to increase efficiency at the cost of employment, and ‘the mystique of coal mining was severed’. ²⁶ But in Poland, Edward Gierek, first secretary of PUWP, who himself had a mining background, decided to continue forced industrialization and thus, with the help of Western credit, to build new heavy industrial facilities. ²⁷ This was followed by excessive improvements in state welfare dedicated to coal miners’ families; as popular opinion claimed: ‘Silesia is so packed with sausages and hams that one can build fences with them.’ ²⁸ In the Solidarity era, the poor image was also a result of coal miners’ reluctance to support the 1980 strike. They joined it just a few days before the signing of the Gdańsk Agreement, when the whole of Poland was already on strike, and signed a new agreement in Jastrzębie, with additional demands devoted exclusively to the needs of the miners. A former teacher summed up such behaviour: ‘they are lone wolves’. ²⁹

The perception of the shipyard workers was very different. Modest, stern and in solidarity with others, they became heroes of the popular imagination when the eyes of all Poland focused on the socialist port. Ryszard Kapuściński, the famous Polish journalist, who visited Gdańsk Shipyard during the 1980 strike, claimed that the calmness of the shipyard workers unlocked the potential of the entire working class: ‘on the Gdańsk coast, and then throughout the entire country, came to light the young face of a new workers’ generation – thoughtful, intelligent, aware of their position in society’. ³⁰ During the two weeks in August 1980, Polish public opinion honoured the shipyard workers as heroes whose bravery had already been shown in December 1970, and now came to the fore once more. ³¹ The affection derived partly from the popular image of a shipbuilding industry that like nothing else combined the ‘liquid’ exoticism of the socialist port city with a ‘solid’ working-class existence.

What also distinguished young shipyard employees of the 1980s from other workers was their relentless desire to change jobs in the face of the challenges and disappointments they faced at their workplace. The imperative of growing the turnover of the industrial workforce during the crisis connected the global markets of capitalism to the state-socialist economies, whereas the mere ability to take risks was a desirable characteristic of the coming reality of the emerging liquid modernity. A high workforce turnover had always been a constant feature in port cities. ³² However, in the case of the socialist port, it became a major problem over time, since it sabotaged specialized production based on the close cooperation of experienced teams. From 1981 to 1984, the number of blue-collar workers in Gdańsk Shipyard dropped by a third. ³³ In the trade newspaper Głos Stoczniowca, the key term that appeared frequently was ‘staff fluctuation’ (fluktuacja), by which journalists meant that the young workers left the shipyards too soon, too often and en masse. ³⁴ Unlike their older counterparts, the young shipyard employees were no longer so committed to the plant when they saw that the promise of advancement and stabilization, equal pay and associated state welfare services, including accommodation, had not been fulfilled. The long-term model of ‘solid modernity’ in which, as Zygmunt Bauman wrote, ‘a young apprentice who took his first job at Ford could be pretty sure to finish his life of work in the same place’ was no longer true. ³⁵

The decisions of young workers to quit their jobs left elder shipyard managements harbouring a grudge, as they were always of the opinion that a young skilled worker who had earned skills in a trade school affiliated to and paid for by the shipyard should not abandon it, but should continue to work for it to give back to the system first. ³⁶ The old shipyard workers still recalled the harsh revolutionary conditions of the socialist port and did not understand the young people who, in their view, were whimsical. In the spring of 1947, born in a village near Starogard, to a family with many children, and without formal education, Józef Badziąg arrived in Gdańsk with just one pair of clothes and a few handy items. He stayed in a barracks on the other side of the Vistula River, opposite Gdańsk Shipyard. Thanks to his employer, he acquired a skill and completed elementary school, which was mandatory if one was to become a foreman. He invoked the memory of the completion of the Sołdek coal and ore freighter, which had frequently been hailed in Stalinist propaganda, together with a larger narrative of the post-war ‘romantic’ approach to work, and of the working class’s successful participation in the rebuilding of Poland and construction of socialism. According to Badziąg, it had been unthinkable to abandon ship, just as a soldier would not leave the post where he was on guard. He had little appreciation for his younger colleagues: ‘He learns to weld to take a stool, to sit in another plant, and to earn no less [. . .]. Yet we can’t build ships in white aprons.’ ³⁷

According to sociological data, an average shipbuilder at the time of the Solidarity upheaval was a man in his mid-twenties, not belonging to PUWP, who came from outside the Tri-City (Gdańsk, Sopot and Gdynia) and graduated from a secondary trade school, with low household income and unstable accommodation. ³⁸ The latter problems – relatively low income and poor housing – were especially acute for young shipbuilding families (who experienced the baby boom of the first half of the 1980s). Frustration was exacerbated by the fact that younger workers, trade school graduates, were generally better skilled than their elders while earning less. ³⁹ Management did not adhere to anticipated wage raises and did not keep promise to improve the company’s social benefits, consistently refusing to raise the amount of housing allotments for young employees. They also disagreed with the proposal to grant shipyard workers exemption from military service. ⁴⁰ Aside from generational disparities and material grievances, many workers saw the same organization of work, linked to particular problems of state planning, as extremely inefficient, causing downtime and a feeling that honest work did not pay off. As one of the shipyard workers stated: ‘people walk around the yard instead of working, and the foreman sits and drinks coffee’. ⁴¹ Left high and dry, throughout the 1980s the shipyard workers went on strike a few more times, in December 1981, March, April and October 1982, July 1985, May and August 1988. ⁴²

Finally, but no less importantly, in the 1980s, the shipyard workers’ frustration was also a result of comparisons with other port city professions. As the exchange rate of the black-market dollar was very high against the złoty, one of the employees complained that ‘outsiders [presumably the short-term contract Indonesian workers who at the time worked for the shipyard] earn 2 dollars an hour, whereas we earn 80 złoty, so they laugh at us’. ⁴³ Jobs outside a state socialist enterprise were peculiarly tempting. As the staff complained, money-changing and entrepreneurship were among the occupations revered on the Gdańsk Coast, whereas an ordinary shipyard welder had lost respect long ago. An employee of Northern Shipyard bitterly recalled a meeting with a former colleague he had run into after a dozen or so years. The colleague, who meanwhile had become a merchant, greeted him with a question about the shipyard: ‘are you still struggling there?’ ⁴⁴ Unlike their elder colleagues, the younger workers found it difficult to accept such comparisons; they were better equipped for change and able to face risks, be it in other state-owned facilities, in private firms, or on the black market.

III

The micro-perspective adopted thus far has revealed the co-existence of liquid modernity and solid modernity in a Polish port under state socialism, as demonstrated by the juxtaposition between the daily lives of seafarers and shipyard workers. It has also shown how, in the 1970s, a new generation of shipyard workers bemoaned the inefficiencies of a shipbuilding industry anchored in solid modernity, choosing to fight back or even to quit their jobs, indicating that they were somehow affected by the global trends of emerging liquid modernity. The focus now shifts from the micro to the macro in order to analyse the ill-fated economic policies of the PUWP leadership. Unwilling to face the complexities of the further integration of the Polish shipbuilding industry into the global economy, they chose to invest in an outdated ‘solid’ growth model, accentuating the stagnation of the industry and rendering it vulnerable to mobilization by young employees who had a better grasp than the authorities of global competition and accompanying individual risks.

Shipbuilding was among the first industries hit by the global crisis of the 1970s, which proved detrimental to the developments of heavy industrial output and workforce security. The oil crises of 1973 and 1979 significantly diminished the demand for huge tankers and forced governments and plant managements to pursue new production plans, technologies and employment policies. Japan, followed by South Korean enterprises, adapted better to the new conditions and dominated the competitive global markets for years. By the time Solidarity was born in Poland, Japan provided more tonnage than the shipbuilders of Europe and both Americas combined. ⁴⁵ Europe could no longer compete with Asian expansion and downsized substantially. The German, Swedish and British shipbuilding industries were briefly on the verge of closing altogether, with workforce numbers and the Western European share in global output dropping sharply. ⁴⁶

The local backdrop to the socialist port drew the attention of leading PUWP officials and party experts in their Warsaw headquarters, who were furnished with documents on the situation at Gdańsk Shipyard, loaded with analyses, data summaries and forecasts. Apart from reporting on the 1980 strike and Solidarity, numerous documents covered conditions in the Polish shipbuilding industry, which had already plunged into crisis. The Polish authorities were generally well aware of the global developments and obstacles that, apart from creating internal inefficiencies in the socialist economy, also affected the production of ships. In their studies, PUWP experts wrote about the long-term impact the oil crises could have on the global crisis in the shipbuilding industry and its workforce. They also acknowledged the increasing competition in the global markets and noticed the growth of the shipbuilding industry in Asia. ⁴⁷

Although PUWP authorities and experts liked to cite the example of Japan, Polish economic policies seemed to remain one of the last bulwarks of ‘solid modernity’, attached to the ideas of extensive growth, continuing expansion of heavy industry and mass employment at the cost of technological improvements. As economic historian Wojciech Morawski has put it, there was a ‘lack of Japanese flexibility’. The authorities did not believe in competition in the field of advanced technologies, such as electronics, which Gierek personally disliked, and focused on continuing the expansion of heavy industry, which by then had been liquidated in modernizing Japan. ⁴⁸ To modernize this way, huge dollar loans were taken instead from Western creditors, which initially contributed to growth in GDP but very quickly turned out to be a costly and long-lasting burden. ⁴⁹

In the case of shipbuilding, which at its height in the second half of the 1970s hired 45,000 people, a third of whom were employed by Gdańsk Shipyard, the main focus was to stop the outflow and increase employment at the cost of innovation. ⁵⁰ New computer technologies were used in the shipbuilding industry only to a limited extent, despite the great interest of the engineers themselves, who were aware of the beneficial effects of programming on the design of the ship’s hull and the preparation time of the shipbuilding offer. In 1980, of 700 engineers working in the Hull Design Office at Gdańsk Shipyard, only a handful had access to computers. ⁵¹ Yet, in the 1970s, the Polish shipbuilding industry did relatively well and managed to produce enough vessels to keep the existing facilities alive. Gdańsk Shipyard, thanks to its varied offer and the partial modernisation, continued to compete on the global markets and sold ships to Western countries and the USSR, building more than 30 ships a year. A large and complicated sea vessel left the plant every two weeks. ⁵² But the overall impact of the improvements was short-term, with dramatic effects on the shipbuilding industry itself.

Apart from Gierek’s conservative economic policies, bureaucracy, central planning and shortages also contributed to the collapse, especially since the shipbuilding industry required strict cooperation: ‘the construction of each ship is a multi-stage, multi-year undertaking involving hundreds of domestic and international agencies and firms employing thousands of people’, noted a study. ⁵³ The Polish interior – steel mills, suppliers of ship equipment, producers of turbines, aggregates, cables, and many other items – was responsible for providing shipyards with key products that had to arrive at the port city on time, follow the stringent requirements of international agencies, and meet the conditions of foreign contractors. ⁵⁴ In the late state socialist centrally-planned shortage economy, such advanced cooperation failed too often. Polish manufacturers fell behind on deliveries because the international requirements established for cables, propellers, prop shafts, engines, screws, sheet metal, pipes and resins were often beyond their capacities. This, in turn, forced the PUWP authorities to abandon policies of self-sufficiency and to import some parts and materials, which meant a loss in foreign currencies needed in a country already heavily in debt. ⁵⁵

In the 1980s, Gdańsk Shipyard manufactured almost exclusively for export, to the Soviet Union and capitalist countries. The contracts imposed strict deadlines and had multiple quality requirements. As Gdańsk Shipyard could no longer comply with them, fines were imposed and discounts were lost. Ships produced for Swedish shipowners, for example Stena Line, were not approved due to delays in manufacturing and defects discovered, such as the use of out-of-date paints and corrosion. Poland was forced to sell such vessels to foreign shipowners at a loss of up to almost half their value. The global reputation of the shipyards was badly affected as a result. The annual value of ship exports to capitalist countries decreased from 150 million dollars in 1977 to 28 million in 1986. As the export surplus over imports decreased to almost zero, Gdańsk Shipyard received state subsidies to finalize the remaining contracts. ⁵⁶

What lulled the decision-makers and experts into a false sense of security at the beginning of the 1980s was the fact that Polish shipyards had contracts with the Soviet Union for new vessels, which, under the conditions of a global downturn, should have ensured capacity operations until at least the early 1990s. Moreover, with 4 per cent of contracts, Poland was fourth in the global orderbook, behind Japan, South Korea and Brazil (but the gap to the leaders, particularly Japan, was huge). ⁵⁷ It was not until the mid-1980s that the authorities fully recognized potential hazards that caused production delays and threatened contracts: bad management, technological problems, material shortages and a workforce inclined to quit.

IV

In 1980, the political setbacks in the socialist port, and the economic downturn of Poland as a whole, caused discontent among the working class. In the long term, in the 1980s, Poland faced numerous socio-economic challenges which, in the case of the shipbuilding industry, threatened the country’s place in the global economy by worsening its economic viability and undermining the legitimacy of the socialist country as a modern enterprise. On the national level, ignoring many mistakes on the part of themselves, PUWP experts arrived at the conclusion that since the 1980 strike Gdańsk Shipyard and the socialist port had become a millstone around state socialism’s neck instead of being a driving force.

In 1988, Mieczysław Rakowski, a PUWP liberal and an advocate of further transformation of the Polish economy towards a free market, became prime minister. The first decision of the new government concerned Gdańsk Shipyard, which was declared unprofitable and put into liquidation in the autumn of 1988. This decision, along with the overall transition from state socialism to capitalism, launched a long process of restructuring and takeovers. ⁵⁸ In spite of the layoffs that finally affected half of the workforce, the shipyard survived as a joint company under the protection of the president of democratic Poland and a former leader of the 1980 strike, Lech Wałęsa. As a result, in subsequent years the facility remained unprofitable. Entering the 1990s, it was badly managed, deprived of modern shipbuilding technology, with high production costs and overemployment. ⁵⁹ The paradox that the shipyard became one of the first victims of the transformation can be seen not only as ‘political revenge’, but also against the backdrop of economic realities of the plant in the mid-1980s. ⁶⁰ Rakowski’s government implemented ‘market socialism’, trusting in the potential of Poland’s economy to change effectively, which was to be accomplished by relaxing constraints on private investment and dissolving or reforming unprofitable enterprises that threatened to sink the entire economy.

The socialist port can be viewed from different perspectives. On the local level, the ‘solidity’ of the land-based heavy industry, combined with the ‘liquidity’ of the socialist port, was a source of frustration to young shipyard workers open to the challenges of globalizing economies and more willing to take on the individual risk. This new category of workers was recognized by the ousted first secretary of the PUWP, Gierek, who appreciated their level of education, professional skills and knowledge of their ‘own plant, city, and province, but also the country and the world . . . For these young people, the foreman [. . .] is no longer a person to be reckoned with’, he concluded. ⁶¹ The generational tensions in the shipyards, resulting both from the material and professional deprivation of mainly the young labourers, who were far better educated than the older generation of shipyard workers, and from different experiences and expectations, were evident and profound. The driving force behind the 1980 Solidarity strike was the deep disillusionment of the younger generation, which, however, was not merely the product of local specifics. The main challenge was that, on the national level, expert reports and the government’s policies concerning the socialist port revealed a strong attachment to the ‘solid modernity’ of the mid-twentieth century, to the paradigm of extensive growth, the predominance of heavy industry and state planning. This perseverance eventually brought the fragile shipbuilding industry to the verge of collapse, particularly when throughout the 1980s deindustrialization, the dismantling of state welfare, the decline of the working class and many other socio-economic problems were the common experience of the capitalist and socialist countries. In Poland, the PUWP leaders, unable to fully acknowledge local and national as well as global developments, responded cautiously, hoping that socialist central planning would be sufficient to escape potential dangers. However, whether they liked it or not, the socialist port, embodied by the young shipyard workers, was already at the forefront of the transformations.