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and physically attacked. In its place sprang up numerous strike committees which became the backbone of the workers' effort to articulate their grievances and to force the newly inaugurated Gierek leadership to deal directly with the workers over the head of the largely collapsed trade union organization. Many of these committees, still function in an informal manner, though their existence is not publicly recognized by the government.
These organizational efforts by the workers in December 1970 are unlikely to lead, however, to a formal rebirth of Poland's once renowned workers' councils which sprang up spontaneously after Gomulka assumed power in 1956. These councils, which for a time gave workers in key plants a genuine voice in management, were soon subordinated to and made component parts of the so-called Workers Self-Government Conferences created by the regime in 1958. In addition to the representatives of the emasculated workers' councils, these organs included representatives of the trade unions, which coordinated their entire activity, and representatives of the enterprise party organization, the Union of Socialist Youth, and management. These organizations, therefore, evolved into the main instruments of the regime's labor policies at the local level.
Since December 1970, Gierek's approach to the trade union movement has reflected his tendency to take a pragmatic and tolerant position coupled with a firm effort to retain existing institutional forms and, through them, to retain ultimate control. This approach has not been wholly successful, however. The still unsettled relationship between labor and the regime was demonstrated during the trade union congress in November 1972.
Although the congress witnessed no open clash between the regime and the workers' delegates, both sides apparently were heard and scored points. Above all, the regime made clear that the December 1970 workers' goal of trade unions independent of the party would not be tolerated. In Gierek's own words at the congress:
- From the very beginning the party has been bonded with the class trade union movement by close links. Its activists and members have been leading the movement for tens of years. This close link between the party and trade unions movement is the source of strength of the working class and the socialist state, and we will never allow it to be upset.
Symbolizing the regime's determination to retain ultimate control over trade union activity was the reelection at the congress of conservative politburo member Wladyslaw Kruczek as chairman of the CRZZ.
In addition, the regime's other central point at the congress was that while it rejects the trade unions' former role as mere transmission belts downward, it would equally strongly reject any efforts to make the trade unions a tool of labor in opposition to the regime. CRZZ chairman Kruczek voiced this new regime view of the trade union as representing both labor and the government in equal measure and of serving as a means of both downward and upward flow of information, in these words:
- The trade unions, serving man in socialist conditions, will protect his interests whenever they might be impinged, but at the same time they must and will help create material goods, improve the economy and the methods of modern production. Last but not least, they are called upon to educate those who failed to grasp the interdependence between the public good and the personal interest of the individual.
In concrete terms, what is new in the role of the trade unions amounts to a commitment by the Gierek regime—an extension of a promise made in December 1970—to bring workers, through the trade union apparatus, into the decision making process before and not after the fact. Nevertheless, once a decision affecting labor has been reached, it is clear that as hitherto the trade unions are there to enforce the party's will, albeit by means of persuasion rather than coercion. How well this will work remains to be seen, especially in view of the regime's concurrent stress on labor discipline and its continued effort to imbue the Polish worker with a stronger work ethic.
The rest of the trade union congress proceedings illustrated the delegates' unwillingness simply to rubber stamp the regime's proposals. Despite reportedly strong objections by some delegates, the conclave did approve the draft of a new trade union charter, whose main provisions were described as formal abolishment of the legal distinction between blue- and white-collar workers, the creation of a new trade union local unit on a multi factory basis, the strengthening of regional trade union organs, and the abolishment of the CRZZ executive committee, i.e., streamlining the leadership which now rests only in the presidium and the secretariat of the CRZZ.
Contrary to expectation, however, the congress failed to approve a new labor code whose draft had been in preparation for almost 6 years; the draft underwent basic revision under Gierek's tenure and could be considered a creature of the new regime. Serious work on a new labor code starting only in 1968, and was designed to codify in one document and to update the compendium of disparate prewar laws and postwar Communist amendments which constitute Poland's labor law. A first draft reportedly was
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