Attempting to organise the Free Trade Unions

In other regions of the country, attempts were made to organise the Free Trade Unions.

Although the brutal pacification of the workers’ protests in 1976 was followed by a period of calm, people did not gave up their attempts to form organisations for workers’ and civic rights. However, that was not easy in a state in which all areas of the social life were controlled by the Security Service, due to which people were afraid of becoming involved in any initiatives against the Communist authorities.

Therefore, the attempts to organise the Free Trade Unions, although taking place in many cities of Poland (Poznań, Łódź, Lublin, Kraków, Nowa Huta, Radom, Toruń, Warszawa, or Wrocław), did not attract too many workers. Nevertheless, there were people who attempted to establish the Free Trade Union in the places they worked and lived. Afterwards, many of them joined the structures of the emerging Solidarity Movement.

A good example is Radom which had suffered especially from the events in June 1976. The attempts to found—significantly, the Free Independent Trade Unions—there in late 1978 were well under way. Obviously, the Security Service and its agents launched counter operations.

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