1 (Un)equal Pay in State-Socialist Poland: The Early Postwar Campaign and Legislation

The women’s sections of trade unions in Poland were established shortly after the war, in 1946. They existed as women’s councils on the workplace level, and the central Women’s Department worked closely with the Central Committee of Trade Unions (this committee was later renamed the Central Council). The early activities of the women’s councils centered on working conditions and control over the enforcement of protective legislation and maternity leave. The councils also promoted the “equal pay for equal work” rule. In the late 1940s, women’s councils perceived unequal pay and the lack of protective legislation—or its poor implementation—as the major problems of working women.

This discourse tackled two dimensions of inequality: the phenomenon of inequality between particular branches of industry depending on the sex of the majority of workers, and the problem of assigning women workers the lowest possible wage within a category. So-called light industry—traditionally feminized and increasingly so during the state-socialist period—was, in general, disadvantaged in comparison to heavy industry and extractive industries in terms of wages and welfare benefits for workers, and the light industrial sector “made the most of its output […] by the exploitation of the cheap labor force. In this regard, pre-war traditions and communist ideological premises worked in the same direction.”¹⁵ This problem, visible to women activists in the late 1940s, would not be solved throughout the entire state-socialist period.

Sector-related inequality was not the only source of unequal pay. Between 1946 and 1949, trade unions’ reports from various organizational levels—the branch-level, regional, and factory-level—frequently mentioned unequal pay and women workers’ dissatisfaction with low wages.¹⁶ The reports referred to the problem as “unequal pay for equal work.” Women workers complained that they received lower wages for “the same activity/occupation” and work “equal to men,” and passed resolutions at meetings demanding equal pay, which was considered a question of “social justice.”¹⁷ For example, women workers in Łódź, a city defined by its female-dominated textile industry, complained that “less experienced and qualified men occupy higher positions and wage groups.”¹⁸ Trade union activists took action against unequal pay, which was present in most of women workers’ complaints.¹⁹ Documents from the Women’s Department reveal that women workers and activists understood unequal pay as lower remuneration for working the same job as men, holding similar qualifications, and/or working in a feminized industry.

After the late 1940s campaign, pay discrimination was no longer discussed. Equal pay was written into the Constitution in 1952; Article 66, devoted to women’s equality, stated that women in Poland had the right to equal pay for equal work. This legislation was usually mentioned as proof of the state’s commitment to equal pay. Nevertheless, the constitutional principle could easily remain on paper, as it did in Italy.²⁰ The Women’s Department was dissolved in the early 1950s, officially because it had fulfilled its role.

As scholars have convincingly shown, wages under state socialism built on traditions that existed before World War Two both in terms of continuities related to “cheap labor” and the conceptualization and measurement of labour.²¹ Continuity was also present in Poland and, in particular, in the ways gender inequality was produced, as Janina Waluk revealed and discussed in her book. After the communist takeover in Poland, the wage system became an object of central planning, and wages were used to incentivize particular groups of workers and regulate consumption.²² In the late 1940s and again from the late 1950s, wages were regulated through collective agreements.²³ Theoretically, wages were differentiated on the basis of the quantity and quality of labour, with the latter including skills, working conditions, and work intensity. As Zofia Morecka, a specialist in socialist political economy and Waluk’s supervisor, explained, equal work was understood as the same work from the perspective of economic characteristics taking into account complexity, intensity, and conditions.²⁴ As Martha Lampland showed for the case of wages on collective farms in Hungary, socialism implemented alternative methods of defining and assessing the value of labour in the absence of free markets.²⁵ In socialist Poland, wages were classified through tariff schemes and pay scales, which were different depending on the particular economic sector.²⁶ This classification system established hierarchies and created space for gender-based discrimination.

The system in place did not eradicate gender-based pay inequality, although it was no longer visible on paper. Collective agreements did not differentiate workers by sex. In the 1940s, some of them explicitly mentioned that the principle of equal pay for equal work should be respected, whereas such formulations were absent after 1956.²⁷ Each job position was assigned a pay group (grupa zaszeregowania) that depended on the level of education (skills) and experience. However, pay scales permitted the differentiation of salaries. Salaries for blue-collar workers were usually either piece-based or time-based, but in both systems, different pay groups existed. Women were often paid lower wages within the scale or were assigned to a lower pay group. The scales easily could be used to produce inequality. “Women’s position is often explained in such a way that she is assigned a lower wage,” and trade union activists pointed to unwritten criteria that governed the process of assigning wages.²⁸ In the late 1940s, women activists also noticed that sometimes collective agreements were not respected.²⁹ In fact, gender inequality was implicitly inscribed into the wage system. According to the law, it was legal to pay higher remuneration to skilled workers in heavy industry than those working in light industry as well as to particular skilled jobs performed by men. For the same job position, then, the differentiation of wages was still possible. However, with the absence of explicit references to gender in pay scales, it was difficult to show how this system discriminated against women.

This statement reflects an ambiguous position on pay inequality. Loga-Sowiński simultaneously acknowledged the constitutional principle of “equal pay” and its lack of “full implementation.” He then undermined the principle, explaining the pay gap by claiming male physical superiority and women’s lack of skills, which led to the assumption that women’s work was in fact unequal to men’s. Loga-Sowiński followed the established wage system that favored male workers and essentialized its justification through a gendered discourse. He referred to jobs that were well paid but which were prohibited for women.³² While the trade union leader was convinced that women’s situation in the workplace needed to be improved, he thought the activity of the trade unions should focus on how to reduce women’s burdens and help them combine paid work and unpaid care work. According to this reasoning, decreasing the double burden of women would lead to greater opportunities for women to gain professional training and, therefore, to earn higher wages.

Economists who published theoretical works and more practical analyses of the wage system usually did not question these assumptions. Jan Kordaszewski, the author of a book on the wage system in industry published in 1962, observed that in Poland, similar to capitalist countries, women worked in particular branches of industry because of health issues and “particular traditions” and that average wages were lower in these branches. However, in Poland, women had access to better-paid managerial positions in industry, whereas women’s unemployment in capitalism “forced women to accept lower wages.”³⁵ The logic was that socialism would help women move into better paid jobs, but it did not challenge the wage system. Overall, the solution to the problem of women’s low wages was focusing on professional training and promoting women to higher positions, a strategy adopted by trade union activists starting in the late 1940s.

In the eyes of both trade union representatives and experts, differences between men’s and women’s wages in state-socialist Poland could not be called “unequal pay.” For this reason, these disparities did not contradict the recognized premise of “equal pay for equal work,” which was understood either as the same work or work that required the same effort and had the same working conditions. They considered (huge) differences in salaries to be justified on the basis of different skills or the amount of physical effort required to perform some “male” jobs. Questioning this narrative required both problematizing “equal work” as well as investigating whether women indeed earned the same wages in the same job positions and actually had fewer skills than their male colleagues. As the next sections show, women in Poland engaged in the reconceptualization of (un)equal pay.

2 The Women’s Commission and the Survey about Work Conditions (1957–1960)

In the post-1956 period, the structure of the women’s movement was reshaped again, and the women’s commissions of trade unions reappeared in workplaces and on the branch and central level in 1957 in order to address working women’s problems, which had to be rediscovered during the process of de-Stalinization. The newly reestablished Women’s Commissions, led by Irena Sroczyńska, who also served as the vice president of the Textile & Clothing Industry Trade Union, addressed a wide range of issues: from working conditions and professional training, to nurseries and cooking courses for women employed in wage work. The commissions attempted to protect women from being dismissed—in the late 1950s, employment reduction policies affected women much more than men—and to contest women’s unemployment. They also aimed to improve working conditions which, they believed, had been neglected during the Stalinist period.

It is important to note that the research undertaken by the women activists of the trade unions between 1957 and 1960 addressed issues of equality. The predominant discourse on women’s employment in the immediate post-1956 period (de-Stalinization) was critical and often questioned ideas about gender equality in the workplace. The backlash against women’s equality was especially visible in the process of reestablishing gender hierarchies in labour. Women’s place in the economy would be in “female” jobs, i.e., jobs that would not endanger their maternal function in the home or society.³⁶ Although women’s employment did not in fact decrease, dominant discourses conceptualized women’s work outside home as complementary; therefore, women’s right to work could be questioned when there was a job shortage (unemployment).³⁷ However, Women’s Commissions connected the concern for protection and women’s extra-professional roles, based as it was on a discourse of difference, with a quest for equality, not perceiving gender difference and equality as contradictory. The late 1950s survey shows how these two dimensions were connected in practice.

It is not clear who exactly was behind the 1957–1960 survey and whether these people were professional sociologists or economists. It was based on a detailed questionnaire activists had to complete; data gathered at local National Councils (local administration) because these councils dealt with employment and ran labour offices; and information collected at selected workplaces.³⁸ The survey was carried out in various cities across different regions and in seventy-eight workplaces covering a range of industrial sectors and small and large factories. The questionnaire included questions about the number of women employed at the end of 1957, 1958, and 1959 and the number of working mothers and single mothers. It also asked for a list of the most common jobs and the number of men and women employed in them; the employment plan for the period 1960–1965; and asked for detailed data about the number of men and women workers in the assigned wage group. The second part of the survey asked about salaries: the most common jobs and wages earned. Furthermore, the survey contained questions about social services for women and children, professional training (the number of men and women that do initial and higher training courses), and the reasons women resigned from training (the opinions of both women and management were to be collected). The fourth section asked about healthcare, knowledge about protective legislation, and whether this legislation was respected in practice (for example, activists were asked to check lists and cards to see if mothers of small children worked night shifts). The fifth and final section included information about absenteeism and overtime. The reports contained statistical data as well as descriptions. The questionnaire shows a complex approach to the measurement of inequalities, taking into account not only job position and wages but also training opportunities for women workers; it also tackled the question of productivity. It therefore took up similar issues raised by international bodies around the same time, when obtaining statistical data remained a key challenge.³⁹

The reports lead to a couple of conclusions concerning job segregation and salaries. In most of the workplaces analyzed, women usually worked different jobs than men, although sometimes there were select jobs performed both by men and women. For instance, in a wood factory in Białystok (eastern Poland), there was nearly total job segregation.⁴⁰ There were a few women performing “male” jobs, but no man held a “female” one. In textile and clothing factories, however, some typical jobs were traditionally feminized, while others were performed by both men and women.⁴¹

Job segregation was crucial for establishing the gendered pay gap. In jobs performed by women, wages were much lower. For example, in a pastry factory, 230 women employed as wrappers earned 800 zlotys per month, while men employed as locksmiths earned 1,500.⁴² In this case, the women might be less qualified, but other examples revealed that this explanation was not always relevant. In a clothing factory in Bydgoszcz, manual seamstresses earned around 1,000 zlotys per month, while (male) pressers earned between 1,800 and 1,940 zlotys. There were also women pressers in the same factory, but they earned less than their male colleagues—although still more than seamstresses.⁴³ This is an illustration of how the socialist “differentiation of wages” and pay scales worked in practice. Women performing “male” jobs could earn more than those working typically “female” jobs, but they were not so numerous, so the average pay for women in a given factory was considerably lower than that of men. The average salaries of men and women were always different, with men earning considerably more.

In factories where a greater number of men and women performed the same jobs, women earned less: usually only 80 to 90 percent of the wages earned by men, but in extreme cases only 50 percent.⁴⁴ In the leather factory “Radoskór” in Radom (central Poland), where many men and women worked as machine operators, women earned between 72 and 79 percent of men’s wages. In this case, the pay gap was narrowing, but there were cases of a reverse trend. In a Cracow-based factory, employed men were given a salary increase of 25 percent, while women got only an 8 percent raise; consequently, women employees earned about 30 percent less than their male colleagues. In sum, the survey showed that equal pay for “equal work,” even in the narrow sense, was not respected.

The survey revealed a complex picture of women’s work, mostly in blue-collar jobs. It was clear that jobs performed most typically by women had lower wages, but it was also evident that men and women working the same jobs were not equally remunerated. This was legally possible because of the flexibility of pay scales, but the survey clearly showed how these arrangements affected women workers in particular.

The data gathered in the survey was used on different occasions. During a central meeting of women activists of trade unions held in 1960, women addressed various issues revealed by the study, commenting also on the “unequal treatment of men and women.”⁴⁵ The summary of the discussion gave an example of salaries of men and women performing the same jobs in the Pharmaceutical Enterprise in Cracow, mentioned that the pay gap had been growing over the last year, and explained that “women were discriminated against when assigning jobs and pay group” and “women with high skills are employed in lower positions.” The suggestion was that discrimination occurred because trade union councils were not controlling salaries well enough. According to the instructions for the survey, reports about particular workplaces were to be sent to the central and regional trade union councils and to the factory’s main office. However, when the crzz organized a general meeting in order to discuss “work among women” in 1963, the issue of unequal pay was not discussed. Irena Janiszewska, secretary of the crzz, only mentioned that the salaries of lower wage groups had been increased, which slightly improved the structure of women’s salaries. Increasing the lowest salaries could be indeed a strategy to combat unequal pay, as the Hungarian case shows.⁴⁶ Janiszewska also focused on the issue of skills and the promotion of women to “male” jobs.⁴⁷ Women were, according to Janiszewska, often reluctant to get additional training or take up these jobs and were therefore to blame for lower wages. In the conclusion, she once again pointed to the pay gap in capitalist countries. These examples show that while the survey provided important evidence that heightened interest in women’s discrimination, simplistic arguments about women’s lower wages persisted.

3 Janina Waluk in Search of Explanations for the Pay Gap

The de-Stalinization process in Poland included the reestablishment of sociology as discipline and the revival of the sociology of work, which—as argued by Małgorzata Mazurek—created an independent discourse on work that served as an alternative to the official ideological discourse of the party-state.⁴⁸ Janina Waluk’s expertise on working women can also be understood as part of a broader trend of research on women’s issues that developed in post-1956 Poland. Scientists and experts from diverse disciplines—sociologists, medical doctors—focused their research on women’s family roles, time, housework, and paid work.⁴⁹ Many studies on women’s employment addressed work, motherhood, and women’s domestic roles.⁵⁰ Sociological studies of industrial work that analyzed hierarchies in different branches of industry and factories also took into account women’s work, often pointing to existing stereotypes of women’s work and the position of women in particular work environments. Women sociologists like Jolanta Kulpińska and Stefania Dzięcielska-Machnikowska analyzed women’s work in managerial positions in the textile industry in the early 1960s, tackling the features of gender-based discrimination and the issues related to job segregation and unequal pay.⁵¹ Other studies investigated women’s absenteeism at work and women’s work productivity.⁵² However, Janina Waluk was the only expert who placed the issue of women’s wages at the center of her research in the early 1960s.

In the introduction to her book entitled Płaca i praca kobiet w Polsce (Work and Pay of Women in Poland), published in 1965, Waluk argued that there was a lack of research on women’s work conducted by experts in various social scientific disciplines. Her main question was about the reasons for the differences between men’s and women’s work. She thought about her research in terms of engagement, as these issues were “currently important” and had practical relevance in relation to job segregation and the gendered wage gap. In subsequent chapters, Waluk attempted to explain the disparities between the salaries of men and women, challenging existing explanations. She used official statistics and data she amassed while closely researching four Warsaw-based industrial plants, where she conducted interviews and collected quantitative data.⁵³

In the first chapter, Waluk analyzed the tradition of women’s low wages, pointing to the fact that historically, women were employed as a cheap labour force and that women’s work equated to exploitation. In interwar Poland, she argued, making references to the work of Halina Krahelska from the 1930s, women workers were treated as a separate category of labourer that was different than both skilled and unskilled workers.⁵⁴ Waluk also analyzed the criteria the wage system was based on, pointing out that there were no job descriptions nor evaluation criteria; consequently, only age and gender were taken into account. “That is how job segregation was created,” she argued. In a socialist economy, equal pay was a constitutional principle, and as Waluk put it, overt discrimination was not possible. By this she meant that collective agreements and pay scales should not differentiate wages by gender, so women should earn the same pay as men for the same work.⁵⁵ Waluk, however, was well aware that this narrow understanding of equal pay was not sufficiently explanatory. Differences did exist, and it was crucial to understand their causes. Here, as Waluk pointed out, official statistics on wages and skills provided little information since sex was included as a category only starting in 1958.⁵⁶ As Silke Neunsinger explains, the construction of wage statistics and their usefulness to describe and combat unequal pay stood at the very center of international struggles against the phenomenon of the gendered pay gap in the late 1950s.⁵⁷ Janina Waluk also struggled with categories and numbers, taking the existing statistics only as a starting point to assess the pay gap.

Waluk tried to assess the differences by looking at the share of low and high salaries for both sexes and analyzing average salaries. The majority of women workers earned less than the average, whereas the majority of men earned more than the average—and among men, the share of workers with high salaries was growing. Moreover, the difference between the median of men’s and women’s wages was increasing. The level of education did not explain the pay gaps Waluk observed, since in groups of workers with the same level of education, the share of women in lower paid jobs was still far greater. Waluk also designed special gauges to measure pay discrepancies. In the factories she analyzed, 97 percent of women workers earned less than 2,000 zlotys per month, and 79 percent of men earned more. She then came up with two hypotheses: either there was wage discrimination (unequal pay for equal work) or the structure of jobs and the skills required were different in the case of men and women. If the latter was true, questions about the causes of discrimination remained, but one should call it professional (job) discrimination, not pay discrimination. On this point, Waluk understood “equal work” as work in the same position, performed by workers with a similar level of skill. While women in industry were less likely to be skilled, according to the official statistics, Waluk’s analysis considered the level of education as well as questioned the actual role skill played in the inequality experienced by women workers, which will be discussed later.

The reflection that followed these comments reveals that equality understood as “equal value” also mattered, as Waluk addressed the methodological problems of how to measure work and compare jobs. Here she took the wording of the ilo as her starting point.⁵⁸ When Waluk spoke about value, she meant the process of labour itself and argued that if we look at work from the perspective of its “social importance,” then many different types of work become comparable. She explained that the wage system in Poland drew on both Soviet and Western systems, with the former concentrating on the process of work and the latter the characteristics of the worker. This combined method did not consider any description of work and, Waluk argued, left “unchanged some particular pay relations that were shaped in the interwar period.” She suggested that “wage relations based on sex” had not been revised, so women’s disadvantaged position persisted. Apart from this, Waluk argued that in practice, wages were based on both formal qualifications established in official wage scales and on the informal evaluation of the worker, in which stereotypes and assumptions played a greater role. For example, women were believed to work less effectively.⁵⁹ In one of the factories she analyzed, Waluk received three different answers to the question of why a male knitter’s pay was higher than that of the female knitter (the jobs had slightly different names): men’s work required more responsibility (women got distracted easily); greater physical strength was necessary to perform the man’s job; and men had to support the family. Inquiring about the causes of women’s lower wages, Waluk went beyond quantitative measurements and interpretations to reveal gender stereotypes that affected the perception of “work of equal value” to a great extent and independently from the formal criteria of skill.

In the second chapter of the book, Waluk looked for the relationship between the employment structure and pay differences, comparing wages in different sectors of the economy and in different industrial branches. She constructed charts that clearly showed hierarchies: the places where many women worked also had the lowest salaries, and the gaps between the wages of men and women had even increased recently. Waluk asked a crucial question: Were salaries low because the employees were women? “We cannot exclude a positive answer to this question,” she concluded. By pointing to gendered wage discrimination embedded in other inequalities that existed between industrial branches, Waluk applied a broad definition of unequal pay. Using the examples of a male technician and a female nurse (both positions that required a secondary education) and a male caretaker/housekeeper and a low-ranked female healthcare worker, she suggested that the (social) value of these jobs was similar, and differences in pay could only be the result of gender.⁶⁰

In the third and last chapter entitled “Women’s qualifications,” Waluk analyzed the relationship between the level of education, skills—which she understood as both formal (“theoretical”) qualifications and practical skills—and wages based on data from two factories. The combination of formal education and practical abilities was difficult to measure and compare, so Waluk only compared formal qualifications and work experience. She observed that in the case of men, salaries depended on the level of education, but this was not the case for women workers. Women with different levels of education worked in the same positions and earned very similar wages. Among white-collar workers, the greatest pay differences between men and women workers occurred within the group with the highest levels of education.⁶¹ Within the group of workers with a secondary school education, women held lower positions than men in spite of having similar work experience and education, or women were employed in positions that did not match their skills. Among blue-collar workers, there was almost a total segregation of “male” and “female” jobs. In the few cases where women and men performed the same job (and had very similar skills), men earned more.⁶² In one of the factories, even with the same level of productivity, which was measured by the fulfillment of the production norms, women earned less. Waluk concluded that in the light of these findings, the argument that women earned less because of lower skills was not true. While in general women’s formal skills in paid employment were lower, skilled women workers were discriminated against and placed in lower pay categories. In the case of women, the relationship between salaries and qualifications was much weaker than for men. Skill remained a gendered category, which meant that improving women’s skills could not entirely abolish unequal pay.

In the conclusion to the book, Waluk urged the state to “ensure compliance with the constitutional principle of equality.”⁶³ She suggested that improving women’s skills and training and adjusting professional preparation to the needs of the industry could improve women’s position. Waluk thought that redirecting women’s professional interests and education (for example, from general secondary education to vocational education) would improve their ability to find suitable employment and could help when assigning women particular jobs. Vocational training activities together with transferring women to “male jobs,” policies pursued by women activists in Poland since the late 1940s, was a strategy recognized on the international level as a way to improve women’s wages starting in the late 1950s. Further, Waluk suggested changing “pay relations based on old traditions,” calling for a revision of the whole system or the establishment of a new one that would draw on “science-based job descriptions,” again connecting to discussions about the same issues taking place elsewhere around the same time.⁶⁴ However, she also noticed the importance of gender stereotypes: “opinions about women’s work and attitudes based on these opinions are real forces.”⁶⁵ Having rejected dominant explanations of gendered pay disparities, and finding that there was no objective reason for women to be paid less, Waluk paid attention to gender hierarchies.

Janina Waluk’s book problematized both the dominant argument about (un)equal pay and the very definition of equal work. In most cases, she defined the latter narrowly—as working in the same position—in order to show that the constitutional principle was not being respected. However, she went beyond this narrow understanding and considered inequality from multiple angles and levels of the employment structure. Her analysis led to the conclusion that in general, women’s wages were lower because of their gender.

4 Conclusion

The survey carried out by the Women’s Commission and the research done by Janina Waluk led to similar conclusions. Women and men usually worked different positions, and “female” jobs had lower salaries. If they happened to perform the same or similar jobs, men almost always earned more and were assigned to better pay groups. The trade union survey also showed that the wage gap grew wider over time because women’s salaries rose more slowly than men’s. Waluk presented a comprehensive picture of pay disparities, and she questioned the argument that differences in skill played the biggest explanatory role. Unlike in the early 1970s in Hungary, the efforts of both the Women’s Commission and Waluk never reached the policy-making level, and there was no campaign for equal pay.⁶⁶

There is no evidence of any form of collaboration or exchange between trade union activists and Waluk on the issue of unequal pay, although in the early 1960s, sociologists and other professionals were sometimes invited by trade unions to speak to their members, and the head of the Women’s Commission attended an interdisciplinary seminar on women’s work at the Polish Academy of Sciences, in which Waluk also took part.⁶⁷ However, the outcomes of both the Women’s Commission’s survey and Waluk’s research reached a broader public through the press and entered into discussions about women’s work; thus, they may be considered contributions to discussions on the same issues that took place in the early 1960s. In an earlier article she published in Życie Gospodarcze (Economic Life), Waluk problematized existing definitions of equal pay, revealed the persistence of “old traditions” of women’s pay discrimination, and called for a “new job classification.”⁶⁸ She also discussed definitions of (un)equal pay. A journalist writing for Rada Robotnicza (Workers’ Council), a trade union periodical, openly discussed multidimensional gender-based discrimination, starting with lower wages.⁶⁹

The renewed interest in equal pay during de-Stalinization in Poland sheds new light on the so-called gender backlash that characterized the period. De-Stalinization opened up new realms of action; the Women’s Commission was re-established in 1957, and experts (economists and sociologists) could develop research that addressed women’s position in the workplace, revealing gender-based discrimination. For the women who designed and carried out such research, tackling unequal pay remained an important goal, and for this reason equal pay was studied independently from the protective attitude toward women workers and women’s roles in the household and family. Women’s Commissions took action against discrimination immediately, continuing their pre-1950 activities. It is important to note that equal pay activism ceased during Stalinism, when a top-down decision abolished the Women’s Commission. But while in the late 1940s, trade union activists propagated the premise of “equal pay” within a strong discourse of equality and mobilized women to stand up for their rights, in the late 1950s and 1960s, activists attempted to measure and define the phenomenon of gendered wage inequality: the survey addressed concrete pay differences, and Waluk’s study sought to trace the entire system that produced these differences. What was characteristic of the post-1956 period was the emphasis on critical knowledge production. As the examples discussed here demonstrate, knowledge production was an important form of women’s labour activism in state-socialist Poland, while other typical forms of activism, such as strikes or collective action, were less available to workers’ organizations. In the case of wage inequality, such knowledge enabled the detection of phenomena that were typically not recognized by socialist economists and (male) trade unionists.

Women activists in Poland rarely referred to international discussions on unequal pay during the period in question, and international conventions did not have a direct impact on conditions in Poland unlike, for example, in Italy.⁷⁰ Nevertheless, equal pay activism tackled similar concerns. Discovering, describing, and defining gendered wage gaps was the aim and strategy to deal with inequality. Unequal pay, even after the passage of the ilo Convention no. 100 on equal remuneration, remained an underdeveloped concept. Similarly to the Hungarian case discussed by Susan Zimmermann, trade union activists and special women’s structures within them were important for shaping the struggle for equal pay, and they embraced an inclusive framing of the concept of equal work.⁷¹ In a socialist country, apart from political and economic differences, women’s equal pay activism had to challenge what male (and not only male) leaders and experts mostly took for granted: there was no gendered wage discrimination in state socialism, and when pay scales were not differentiated by sex, unequal pay was much more difficult to identify. This feminist action, realized within the official structures of the party-state, questioned the post-1956 state-supported gender regime. As such, these efforts were an important part of the global struggle for equal pay for women workers.