Social Forces and the Post-communist Transition: Why Labour Turns Right

In the summer of 1994, I visited the small Polish manufacturing city of Starachowice. A city of some 60,000 residents, it boasted one large factory, the Star car plant, which had employed some 24,000 workers in the 1970s, down to 18,000 in 1989, and now, after several rounds of layoffs, early retirements and industrial restructuring, left only with some 5000 employees and more layoffs scheduled soon. There were 14,000 unemployed in the city, giving an unemployment rate of about 45 per cent, but this did not include the 6000 people whose unemployment benefits had already expired. Inside the plant I met with two Solidarity officials, the vice president of the car assembly plant and the president of the union at the parts division. (Like most other large manufacturing plants, this one had been broken down into several formally independent companies as a prelude to full-scale privatization, and each company now had — or, in some cases, did not have — its own tradeunions.) When I asked them about the situation at the plant, they both complained about the unprecedented economic depression and then unleashed a torrent of angry words filled with attacks on ‘the communists’ and insisting that a ‘right-wing’ government must come and change things. Such comments were already familiar to me, but I decided to play dumb, and so when one of them next told me about his ‘right-wing’ views I interrupted to express surprise, noting that many people see trade unions themselves, in their very essence, as leftist institutions.