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Article: How Poland's Solidarity won freedom of association.
- Article from:
- Monthly Labor Review
- Article date:
- September 1, 1989
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1989 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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How Poland's Solidarity won freedom of association
Through 9 years of dramatic struggle, Solidarity and its supporters held firmly to no compromise on the basic right to form independent and self-governing unions
In the summer of 1980, a trade union strike committee, initially representing workers in some 20 state-run enterprises in the Gdansk region on Poland's Baltic coast, debated for days the formulation of a series of demands--most of them beyond the province of local authorities--to make on the Communist Polish government. The final list, posted in the huge Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, contained 21 demands. The first was the most important:
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