1 Unskilled Women’s Strikes in the Historiography

Labour historians had long ignored or belittled non-union or non-party women’s strikes and actions, treating them as eruptions of emotions and dismissing the skills workers had to possess in order to organize them, as well as their impact.¹² Due to the belief that the traditional institutional form of labour organization was necessary to achieve a certain level of coordination, large strikes were at times assumed to be organized by unions or political parties despite evidence to the contrary.¹³ In the state-socialist historiography, such a conviction was perhaps even more pronounced than in Western Europe.

The primary goal of historians of the labour movement on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain was to trace the genealogies of the revolutionary party as the vanguard of the proletariat. While after de-Stalinization, political control over the historiographical writing decreased, studying labour history as the teleological development of the communist movement and its perceived predecessors was still expected. Within the boundaries of the Marxist-Leninist dogma, spontaneous “economic” strikes were of much less concern than were labour actions organized by political parties.¹⁴

A fitting example of historians’ reluctance to acknowledge the abilities of non-organized women workers is the scholarship on the 1883 strike in Żyrardów, which is considered the first modern general strike in the Polish lands. The strike was, without a doubt, initiated and sustained by women winders. Various scholars, nevertheless, presented it as organized by skilled male weavers under the influence of the Social-Revolutionary Party “Proletariat,” despite extremely weak evidence suggesting that party members were even present in Żyrardów at any point and, indeed, evidence that demonstrated weavers’ initial reluctance to join the striking women.¹⁵

The seminal work of Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland, introduced the subject of the postwar protests of women working in the textile industry into Polish labour history. Kenney also provided a broader perspective on women’s labour actions in Łódź during the state-socialist era up to the formation of Solidarność (1980), demonstrating how important and effective women’s strikes and demonstrations were and how they were forgotten and erased from the historiography.¹⁶ Kenney saw the postwar textile workers’ community of Łódź as divided into two groups: the prewar, egalitarian working class led by experienced men and women workers—often Socialist and/or Communist¹⁷ organizers during the interwar period, who used class-centered discourse and struggled to preserve newly-gained control over their workplace—and the anarchic youth. Kenney did not insist on the strikes’ organized character. Following the party reports, he pointed out that there was a new kind of strike that developed in the postwar era: a leaderless action. For him, leaderless strikes were the domain of younger workers and were invented in the absence of an independent organized labour movement.¹⁸

Transwar research on Żyrardów complicates this picture. First, the leaderless strikes were not a novelty that emerged after the end of World War Two. They were a tactic well-known to unskilled women textile workers during the interwar era. Second, labour actions in the Żyrardów Works were, without a doubt, started by women with prewar experience of work and protest but oftentimes not by former Socialists, Communists, or trade unionists. On the contrary, the shops with the largest share of members of unions and the socialist and communist parties, both before and after the war, were less likely to strike. Third, in Żyrardów, a class-centered discourse focused on control of the workplace was rarely employed in the postwar era by the striking women workers (both those with prewar and postwar work experience and those with only a postwar history of employment). As I will demonstrate, striking women were much more eager to frame their protest in terms of solidarity with the local community and motherhood, and their demands were focused on consumption and work norms rather than control of the shop floor.

2 Spinners’ Protests in the Interwar Period

For the entire duration of the interwar period, the two main unions in Żyrardów, a left-wing union and a nationalist union, represented mainly the skilled male workforce, and their most prominent organizers were almost exclusively craftsmen and weavers with the exception of a few winders working in the weaving shops.¹⁹ Even the mass dismissals of skilled workers and the crackdown on union activity that took place in the aftermath of a large strike staged against the Taylorization of the shop floor in 1926 did not upend existing union hierarchies.

The factory management intentionally attempted to replace skilled labour with young, unskilled workers, in particular women. According to a socialist journalist, by the mid-1930s, one could hardly find any men working in production at the factory.²⁰ This was certainly an exaggeration, and men were employed as production workers, in particular as weavers; however, women also worked as loom operators in the weaving sections of the Żyrardów Works in the mid-1930s.²¹

Despite the changes in the gender and skill distribution of the factory labour force, the composition of the class union chapter did not seem to change significantly. Skilled workers in the weaving shops and craftsmen continued to constitute most of its membership.²² No attempts were made to appeal to the workers of the spinning sections of the factory who were now almost exclusively young and frequently underaged women. Spinners, for example, did not receive a wage increase and back pay for the wages lost due to the company’s failure to respect the national collective agreement. Even though management admitted that spinners should have also been paid more after striking weavers won the right to their back pay in a 1935 strike in Żyrardów, union leadership did not follow up on this issue. They left the matter in the hands of the Labour Inspectorate, which they considered powerless.²³ The disregard for unskilled women workers’ struggles at the Żyrardów Works was not exceptional. For example, in 1931, the leadership of the left-wing Male and Female Textile Industry Workers Union (Związek Zawodowy Robotników i Robotnic Przemysłu Włókienniczego; also known as the class union, związek klasowy) in Łódź refused to recognize and support the strike of women weavers in the Geyer factory against the increase in the number of looms operated by a single weaver. It is worth noting that this was the same issue that drove union-organized male weavers to strike in the city the very same year (including a male weavers’ strike at the Geyer factory only a few months later).²⁴

In 1936, Maria Kirstowa, a labour inspector for the Warsaw district in the 1920s, contended that women employed in industry were disinterested in unions, and, even worse, that they undermined collective actions due to their “deeply rooted passivity.” Only when pushed to the brink would they lose their emotional stability and become more “passionate” than their male colleagues. Paradoxically though, Kirstowa demonstrated that unorganized women were anything but passive or incapable of taking action. The former labour inspector cited the case of an undisclosed small-town curtain factory in which unionized weavers decided to go on strike in 1924, demanding better pay for themselves without having consulted with workers employed in the spinning section. The non-unionized women spinners not only did not join the action; they actually exhausted every avenue to break the strike. When their attempts to convince the management to hire strike-breakers—which was not possible due to the lack of willing weavers—and resume production failed, the spinners even petitioned the Labour Inspectorate to deem the strike illegal. Every day the factory machines stood still, the women were losing money they would not receive even if the strike succeeded.²⁵ The working women went to great lengths to stop the strike, and they were very much active but in defiance of the class solidarity promoted by Kirstowa.

The unorganized women were not only capable of protesting against a strike. They were able to act on their own behalf as well. Stanisława Miszkiewiczowa, a winder at the Żyrardów Works, wrote a short memoir about one such instance in 1923. Despite only brief work experience in the Żyrardów Works and her relatively young age, Miszkiewiczowa became an informal delegate of her shop in a labour dispute with the management. There was no union involvement in the dispute whatsoever. A group of winders simply barged into the directors’ offices and forced the managers present at the time to speak with them.²⁶ The fact that multiple workers entered the office was likely intended both as an intimidation tactic as well as a method of diffusing responsibility (there was no single leader of the action). Kirstowa’s colleague Halina Krahelska describes similar tactics in her fictionalized story—which was rooted in fact—about a factory called Szpilka, written in the late 1930s. In Krahelska’s narrative, a large group of women rather than a single delegate (the latter of which had been agreed to previously), burst into the office of a labour inspector to demand he remedy their problems with a computer, i.e., a person responsible for calculating earnings in the piece-rate system, who was cheating them out of their wages.²⁷

The workers in Żyrardów demanded that they should not be required to walk up and down four flights of stairs carrying heavy skeins to warp the yarn, which became a necessity due to changes in the production process. The management caved, despite its initial refusal, and agreed to bring the machines down from the fourth floor. According to Stanisława Miszkiewiczowa, the delegation achieved its goals thanks to the strength and cleverness of her argument. When the general manager claimed that in Russia (where he had previously worked), thirteen-year-old children easily did the job and threatened that this may soon be the case in Żyrardów as well, the young organizer responded that “in a couple of years, children might be difficult to come by [trzeba będzie szukać ze świeczką],” suggesting that if the conditions of work persisted, women might not be able to become mothers.²⁸

Stanisława Miszkiewiczowa used her status as a potential life-giver (and as an actual mother, as she had already given birth to a son) to negotiate with the state authorities, a strategy that proved particularly effective in the newly created Republic because political elites claimed that there was a need to make up for the population losses the Polish nation suffered during the Great War. Motherhood was mobilized by Żyrardów’s women workers multiple times in disputes with both factory management and the state before and after World War Two. Even seasoned communist activists in the post-World War Two era presented themselves as mothers in the party forum during disputes over wages, housing, and the availability of basic products, underscoring their responsibility for feeding their children rather than their rights as workers.²⁹

Women workers resorted to the classic repertoire of union actions and staged strikes, albeit in a distinctive form: they preferred sit-down strikes over walkouts, and they avoided organizing strike committees or other, more formalized forms of representation. These tactics limited the risks involved in striking by diffusing responsibility, similar to when the group stormed the offices of the factory management. For example, in 1927, the women workers of the sewing shop in the Stradom factory in Częstochowa took part in a sit-down strike action. The striking women did not choose any representatives. Instead, a union delegate took it upon himself to negotiate with the management, which subsequently caved to the sewers’ demands relating to changes in the method of measuring piece-work rates. Six years later, in the weaving and finishing shops of the nearby La Czenstochovienne factory, a similar action was staged: the women working there organized a sit-down strike without any union involvement and refused to select representatives. This time, however, the brutal intervention of the police put an end to the workers’ protest.³⁰

A strike action was also undertaken by the non-unionized spinners in Żyrardów. In 1938, the predominantly unskilled and unorganized women workers of the linen spinning section of the town’s main factory staged a successful sit-down strike in response to the reorganization of production, which if implemented would heavily increase the workload; the action lasted a whole day and night. Information on the strike is scarce, but it seems to have followed the above pattern established by other groups of women workers.³¹

The tactics the spinners developed as a group during the interwar period, such as storming the offices of management and leaderless strikes, allowed them to fight for their needs without taking on a significant amount of risk and without the financial burdens related to union membership, such as dues. These tactics became more useful in the postwar context—when it became impossible to organize strikes within a union framework—than were the traditional weapons of the prewar organized working class.

3 The First Postwar Strikes

As World War Two came to a close, in the territories of Poland, Czechoslovakia,³² East Germany,³³ and to a lesser degree Hungary,³⁴ factories were taken over by their employees either right before the Red Army’s arrival or shortly afterward. In eastern and central Poland, workers’ councils were usually organized and manned by small groups of workers under the influence of the communist movement, usually by members of the Polish Workers’ Party (i.e., the party of Polish communists that existed between 1943–1948; hereafter, ppr), or even by the ppr’s special envoys. In Żyrardów, the line between the party committee and the workers’ council in the Żyrardów Works was blurred, and even these bodies’ members had difficulties understanding the differences between the two.³⁵ The first elections to the councils were called only after these organs had lost most of the power to the state administration and management in mid-1945.³⁶

The attitude of the spinners toward the councils was ambiguous or even hostile, and there were two main reasons for this. First, similar to the structures of the prewar labour movement, spinners were de facto excluded from participating in the councils because they were dominated by skilled male workers. The effect was heightened by the fact that skilled men constituted an outsized proportion of the workforce in early 1945. Production was limited by both the low demand for textiles and the lack of resources to manufacture them; for this reason, relatively few production workers were employed. At the same time, a large number of craftsmen were required to repair the damage the factory suffered at the hands of the retreating German military and the advancing Soviet army. This partially explains why the proportion of male workers was very high immediately after the war and began to fall by mid-1945 (although men worked in large numbers in the weaving section and in some other shops as well). In April 1945, male workers constituted over 63 percent of workers, and two months later, 59 percent, and their proportion of the factory workforce continued to fall.³⁷ Unsurprisingly, therefore, the first leader of the council of the Żyrardów Works was a metal worker, and most of his colleagues worked in maintenance.³⁸ The problems of spinners were not considered urgent.³⁹ Instead, the council and the communist party were focused on protecting the interests of craftsmen (often successfully). Second, spinners did not seem to be interested in self-managing their workplace. They were used to acting outside the structures of organized labour since the interwar period and preferred to speak with the management directly without representative institutions acting as intermediaries. Already in May 1945, the women workers from the linen spinning section went on strike after a group of spinners demanding better supplies of coal and food were barred from entering the director’s office.⁴⁰ The director had learned his lesson, and in the following weeks, he negotiated with the spinners without any intermediaries.

Observing the nationwide failure of the councils and unions to represent the majority of workers, the government and communist party leadership tried to formalize negotiations between the management and workers without union intermediaries by introducing “workshop delegates” by decree in January 1947.⁴¹ To a limited degree, delegates who were elected by small groups of workers fulfilled their intended role of relaying workers’ demands to management, particularly in the early 1950s.⁴² However, these individual delegates did not have the collective power held by a group of workers; thus, the tactic of storming management offices as a group continued to be employed by spinners (and also by women weavers).⁴³

In case group negotiations failed, a proper strike was an option. Strikes were rare in the 1930s due to the threat of unemployment, and they became impossible in the state-owned and heavily guarded Żyrardów Works (although they still occurred in private factories elsewhere) during World War Two. After 1945, the fear subsided, and striking became almost a routine for spinners. Already in December 1945, in connection with industrial action in the Żyrardów Works, a regional ppr committee informed the national party leadership that “the attitude ‘if we don’t strike, we won’t get anything; only those who strike get something’ began to dominate in some factories of our region.”⁴⁴ The strike was often intended simply to force the works council and party committees to allow direct communication between workers’ delegations and the appropriate higher authorities without intermediary representative institutions.⁴⁵

The strike of December 1945 was a part of a long dispute over work norms that had begun in the late summer. In September, women spinners, who laboured in a piece-rate system, complained that their norms, which were based on the output of workers in Łódź factories, were impossible to fulfill due to the antiquated machines installed in the Żyrardów Works and the inadequate quality of raw materials. The norms were decreased by 5 percent twice, but the workers felt this was not enough. The strikers also asserted that it was unjust that only spinners received premiums for exceeding the norms, while workers assisting them, as fixed-rate employees, were exempt from these bonuses.⁴⁶ Seeing that the director—with whom they talked directly because they refused to negotiate with the party and works council delegates—did not have the right to fulfill their demands, they agreed to end the strike on the condition that the higher state economic and union authorities would come to a conference in Żyrardów to discuss their demands.

The problems that spinners decided to strike over were almost identical to the issues the male craftsmen and factory guards (who were generally recruited from veterans of the communist movement) raised in September. The latter were also dissatisfied with the fact that as fixed-rate employees, they were not eligible for bonuses. They did not, however, have to resort to strikes. The craftsmen successfully used the committee of the communist party in the Żyrardów Works to forward their demands in the form of a petition that used egalitarian communist discourse.⁴⁷ The guards, in turn, would use the conference requested by the spinners to secure wage increases.⁴⁸

4 The Strikes of 1947

Spinners were responsible for starting the vast majority of strikes in Żyrardów during the postwar era. Weavers’ strikes were rarer and usually followed strikes in the spinning shop, but the strikes of the two groups were never coordinated, and weavers and spinners always presented separate demands—and weavers’ strikes were usually shorter. Conversely, craftsmen never called strikes: they had no reason to since relevant party structures and works councils were doing their best to accommodate these workers’ demands. The history of a series of strikes in Żyrardów staged in the summer of 1947 and 1951 exemplify this pattern well.

By late 1947, women became a dominant part of the labour force in the Żyrardów Works. They constituted over 57 percent of factory workers (this statistic includes both production and maintenance workers).⁴⁹ Women continued to monopolize jobs operating spinning machines and also seemed to dominate loom operations as well, although we lack precise data.

On 13 August 1947 at around eight thirty in the morning, the linen spinning workers of the Żyrardów Works stopped the machines. They did not select any representatives nor did anyone seem to be the strike leader. Instead, a non-party member of the works council and a labour inspector began writing down the demands voiced by the strikers. The workers demanded the elimination of rationing, the availability of food staples (white bread, meat, słonina, and potatoes) in shops, coal allotments, and wage increases together with monthly backpay. The demands did not end there, though. The workers also wanted to abolish the works council and reinstate the free market in foodstuffs.⁵⁰ When the representative of the Commission of Price Control came to speak with the spinners, he was met by workers shouting: “We don’t want price control; price control bankrupts bakers and butchers; we don’t have bread and meat, what do we need a government like this for?”⁵¹ Meanwhile, workers employed in the spinning section were joined by weavers. Around one in the afternoon, just as the shifts changed, some of the spinning section workers remained in the factory, turning the strike into a sit-in, while other strikers used violence to stop strike-breakers from returning to their machines.⁵²

The support for the strike in the weaving section, however, slowly crumbled. All those who were members of the communist party had resumed production much earlier, around ten thirty in the morning. They were joined by the Socialist weavers four hours later. Around five o’clock that evening, most of the weavers were back to work and formed a delegation armed with a list of demands that were similar to those of the spinners but which had been stripped of the most “political” points: the elimination of the works councils, rationing, and price controls. The spinners, who finally formed a delegation an hour later—likely because they observed that the weavers’ delegates were not persecuted as strike organizers—and withdrew their demand for the abolition of the works council and instead called for changes to the council’s composition.⁵³ They did not, however, return to their machines immediately. It was around eight o’clock at night when the strike ended. The next day, the town was well-supplied with white bread and meat, but the other workers’ demands were left unaddressed.⁵⁴

In my opinion, the communists were unable to accept that a strike of this magnitude was not coordinated by political actors. After it ended, local communists rushed to blame the Socialist party leadership for organizing it. The communist narrative was accepted by the ppr special delegate from the Regional Committee and passed on to the Central Committee ppr. The leader of the local socialist chapter, Agnieszka Tomaszewska, was personally singled out as the strike organizer.⁵⁵ Małgorzata Fidelis, who also analyzed these events, emphasized the fact that the (male) communists and Socialists were puzzled by the strike and attributed it to the stereotypical backwardness and irrationality of women.⁵⁶ Gender certainly played a role here, and our (my and Fidelis’s) interpretations may be considered complementary: the communists alleged that the socialist organizers manipulated the women strikers easily due to their “backwardness” and lack of political consciousness.

The communist accusations against the Socialists were based on weak evidence and were, in fact, absurd. The main demand of the strikers targeted the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna; hereafter, pps) directly. The workers complained about the quality of the bread baked in a Socialist-controlled cooperative and demanded a change or the elimination of a works council that had a safe Socialist majority and a Socialist president.⁵⁷ Furthermore, the sources show that pps members neither instigated the strike nor were they the most enthusiastic participants in it.⁵⁸

At the same time, according to one of the town’s Socialist leaders, in the linen spinning section, Socialist workers did not hesitate to join the strikers. The political parties in linen spinning were generally very weak, and the workers were even hostile toward party organizers from the pps and the ppr alike. The spinners seemed to consider belonging to the party shameful, and Socialist workers hid their party pins in shame.⁵⁹ Members of the pps in the weaving section, both men and women, were not eager to join the strike although they did so in solidarity with the whole shop. Socialist weavers, however, resumed production shortly after pps leaders went to the shopfloor to speak with them. Similar conversations with the linen spinners did not achieve any results, and only in the combing and tow-breaking sections, which were dominated by skilled male workers, did the Socialists return to work. The situation was similar in the case of ppr workers: weavers resumed production, and spinners did not. Although the weavers might have been threatened, it is much more probable that they were simply convinced by their leaders to end the strike.⁶⁰ They had more trust in labour leaders than spinners ever did, and they were more used to maintaining party and/or union discipline. Weavers resumed production first and then formed a delegation, trusting that its demands would be heard. Spinners did so only after talks were concluded and carrying on with the strike seemed pointless: night was coming, and they were not prepared to spend it in the factory.⁶¹

The strike in the linen spinning section did not have the characteristics of a party- or union-organized action. Instead, it followed the tactics of the leaderless sit-down strike unskilled labourers often called during the interwar period. Furthermore, the demand to eliminate the works council was voiced only in the linen spinning shop and not in the weaving section. Unlike the weavers, the spinners did not believe, and probably rightly so, that these representative institutions would serve their interests. The works council was useless in their minds, only impeding direct communication between workers and management. Moreover, they certainly blamed the council for the failure to provide bread and coal to the workers.

Against the backdrop of the strikes in Łódź during the same period, the strike of 1947 was rather exceptional in terms of its demands. The strikes that took place in the 1940s were generally “apolitical” and focused on issues concerning food supply and production norms. The most remarkable demand in this strike was the call to eliminate price controls and the Social Commissions enforcing it. In contrast to Żyrardów, the commissions in Łódź seemed to be, at least initially, very popular among workers. As Padraic Kenney noted, they were an “outlet for class anger” and produced a discourse later used against managers and the communist party outside of the institutional framework.⁶² The spinners striking in Żyrardów, however, did not act as workers advocating solely for themselves. They conceived of their action as a struggle on behalf of the whole local community in which “bakers and butchers” were important members who provided valuable services. In fact, the striking spinners were more invested in the interests of bakers and butchers and the services they provided for the community than those of their fellow workers from other sections of the factory as there was no coordination between the spinners and weavers of the Żyrardów Works.

5 The Strikes of 1951

The introduction of the first fully Stalinist Six-Year Plan in 1950 effectively reduced the wages of Żyrardów workers. Moreover, the overemphasis on heavy industry and the forced collectivization campaign led to food shortages. Falling wages also limited workers’ ability to procure meat on the black market. The implications of the two overlapping problems became particularly pronounced in the summer of 1951 and led to a series of short strikes in the linen spinning and weaving sections, which came to a head on 16–18 August 1951.

By that time, both the spinning and weaving sections were almost completely feminized.⁶³ Since 1949, the communist party began vigorously campaigning for women’s equality in the workplace at the national level and enhanced its efforts to expand its female membership. In 1950, women constituted 60 percent of the party organization in the Żyrardów Works, slightly lower than the share of women among all of the factory’s employees. The men, craftsmen and foremen in particular, retained their positions in the shopfloor party structures, however. In 1951, even in the weaving section, almost all secretaries of the party cells were still male foremen.⁶⁴ Equality in the workplace was even harder to achieve. Attempts to promote women to the position of foreperson and employ them in craftsmen’s jobs failed due to the resistance of factory administration and male workers. Forewomen were extremely rare: in 1951, there were 115 foremen and only 2 forewomen in Żyrardów.⁶⁵

On 3 August 1951, shop delegates from the linen spinning section went to the party Works Committee. Their demands were not satisfied, so they subsequently headed straight to the Town Committee of the pzpr, demanding that meat be delivered to the town, as it had been missing from the shelves for a week. They were promised that it would arrive soon. The same day, a group of weavers threatened the general director with a strike if the meat did not arrive. The meat was delivered, demonstrating to the workers that putting pressure on the management and the party was a strategy that yielded tangible results. What is interesting is that the spinners and weavers acted separately from each other and were unaware of each other’s actions. There was no communication between the two sections.⁶⁶ On 12 August 1951, the majority of workers employed in one of the weaving shops (around 200 of 250 employed) walked out and congregated in front of the offices of the general director, this time demanding coal. The weavers, however, quickly returned to work. They were convinced to do so after the town secretary of the pzpr and the director proposed that they elect delegates from among them to conduct further negotiations.⁶⁷

On 16 August, around eight o’clock in the morning, multiple delegations of workers from various shops of the linen spinning section visited the office of the section director. Their main demand was related to small payments they had received two days earlier, and they also wanted to know when meat would be delivered. Not having received a satisfying answer, the delegates returned to their shops, and shortly after, a strike broke out in most of the linen spinning section, initially in wet spinning. By five o’clock that evening, the spinners were joined by one weaving shop situated in the adjacent building. The weavers were on strike for only three hours and did not present demands, wanting only to speak with union delegates. The linen spinning workers did not restart their machines for the whole day. The next day, the strike started in parts of the linen section and one of the weaving shops, later spreading to two other shops in the weaving section. The spinners were on strike for only an hour and a half. The strike in the weaving shops was a rolling one, so it was difficult for the reporting officers to ascertain its real scope, but it ended at six thirty that evening. In turn, however, the Żyrardów Clothing Works (Żyrardowskie Zakłady Odzieżowe), until recently the sewing section of the main factory, went on strike for the entire day. On 18 August, the workers on the first cotton spinning shift did not start their machines, although those working the second shift did.⁶⁸

The events of 16–18 August 1951 can hardly be described as a singular strike. We should look at them as a series of limited strikes. Although the cotton spinners and the weavers were inspired by the linen spinners, their strikes took different forms and had overlapping but different demands. This was the case already in 1947, but in 1951, it became even more pronounced. Similar to 1947, the linen spinning section not only started the 1951 strikes but was on strike the longest of the sections. While spinners presented their demands before the strike, the strikers themselves did not choose any representatives.

We should differentiate between the two strikes of the weavers and between the strikes of the linen and cotton spinners. The weavers’ strike on 16 August was well-organized. Unlike the actions of the linen spinning section, those of the weavers were coordinated, and around forty workers met in one of the toilets to develop a strategy before the strike broke out. The weavers’ primary demand was to speak with the union bosses so that they could explain the lack of meat on the shelves. Just as in 1947, the weavers believed in the effectiveness of the trade unions even if these organs needed to be pressured to act.⁶⁹ The traditional organization seemed to hasten the strike’s end. Janina Szymańska, the principal coordinator of the action and a worker with prewar experience in the Socialist party, was invited to a meeting with security and party authorities. Whether she was threatened or simply convinced that the problems of the workers would be addressed, we do not know; perhaps it was both. Whatever happened, after she returned to the shop floor, the workers gathered around her, and soon the looms were running again.⁷⁰

Gareth Pritchard, when explaining why the labour movement in Eastern Germany did not actively challenge the “Sovietizing” policies, contended that “to break with the regime would mean acknowledging that all their struggles and suffering had achieved nothing.”⁷¹ Hence, there existed a psychological mechanism that disincentivized protest and encouraged compliance. Former Socialists in Poland and Germany were certainly critical of the state-socialist reality. Nevertheless, they were more likely to conform to the position of labour institutions and end strikes after speaking with union and party functionaries. Regarding the example of strikes in the Dąbrowa Basin in 1951, Jan-Arendt de Graaf has shown that prewar members of Socialist and Communist labour organizations could have been convinced to return to work by invoking traditions of the working class and emphasizing the differences between prewar struggles with capitalists and the postwar strikes.⁷² Perhaps this was the case with Janina Szymańska in Żyrardów in 1951.

The strike on August 17 was notably different. The report does not mention Szymańska at all, nor does it indicate any form of planning. Mainly young weavers, the so-called “Hanka Sawicka line” that was supposed to be an exemplary youth brigade, went on strike, and they did not present any demands. The only worker who was identified as a strike organizer by name was a member of the communist youth organization who not only instigated the action in her shop but forced those resisting to participate in it using threats and violence. The strike was a rolling one. Its form was a consequence of the lack of communication rather than careful planning. First, there was much misinformation as to whether other shops continued to strike. Second, the shortages of materials caused by a strike in one shop forced other shops to temporarily halt production. A true strike was indistinguishable from a stoppage, at least for the reporting officers.⁷³

The second strike in the weaving shop had much in common with the strikes called in the sewing and cotton spinning sections. In these strikes, younger workers were a leading force, and threats of violence were present: an empty bottle was even thrown at strike-breakers in the cotton spinning section as they were leaving the factory.⁷⁴ Unlike the linen spinning section, the cotton spinning shops—particularly affected by the Six-Year Plan—were no longer dominated by older workers as most experienced cotton spinners transferred to other sections where the pay was better.⁷⁵ The unrestrained and violent character of the strikes in the sections where the youth dominated, in contrast with the calm and easily resolved strike in the weaving room, is not surprising. Pritchard identified a similar pattern during the Berlin Uprising; strikes organized by veterans of the labour movement were generally “disciplined” and short-lived, while those in which young workers took the lead were “unorganized, spontaneous and violent.”⁷⁶ As I have shown above, at least in Żyrardów, there was a third category: a strike organized by older workers who had not belonged to prewar labour organizations. These strikes did not require using violence against strike-breakers as the bonds of solidarity were stronger than in the shops dominated by the youth, and strike-breaking was rare. They were, however, not led by a single person or a small group of workers and lasted much longer than those in sections where old labour organizers held sway.

6 Conclusion

In Żyrardów during the post-World War Two era, the labour strikes that were the most powerful and also the most difficult to suppress were not those called by long-time skilled members of the organized labour movement, as is commonly asserted in the scholarship; nor were they the actions planned by the anarchic youth. They were the labour actions staged by women spinners with prewar experience in organizing strikes and other collective actions that differed significantly from those dominated by mostly male organized workers under the capitalist regime of the interwar period. These women had not belonged to labour organizations before 1939, and they continued to treat unions and labour parties with suspicion after 1945. These women’s lack of ties to organized labour made it almost impossible for the party and union activists to convince or force workers to return to work. Furthermore, spinners were more likely to use a discourse that diverged significantly from communist party ideology. They performed their intersectional, multi-dimensional identities based not only on a narrowly understood concept of class but also on the basis of their gender and their sense of belonging within the local community.

The workers who formed the core of the working-class movement before 1939, men in particular, generally remained faithful to its guidance and rarely resorted to strikes after the war. They were able to frame their demands within the accepted communist discourse and forward them through official channels. When a strike did take place, the union and party leaders were usually able to get these workers to back down. I may even go so far as to say that Socialist and communist workers alike helped maintain the stability of communist power in Żyrardów. This does not mean, however, that they accepted the policies implemented by the state.

It is difficult to expand the findings of this chapter to other Polish textile production centers. Łódź, for example, was one of the centers of Polish organized labour. Before the war, unions had greater influence there than they ever had in Żyrardów; hence, the prevalence of discourse on class struggle was likely greater there as well, as shown by Padraic Kenney. The example of Żyrardów spinners certainly proves, however, that we should pay more attention to the heterogeneity of workers’ culture and recognize the ingenuity and perseverance of workers who were not able to act through, or who rejected, the structures of organized labour and study their discourses and practices both before and after World War Two.