Negotiations
On the day that the committee was formed, August 17, MKS posted a handwritten list of twenty-one demands in the shipyard. These demands were far broader and all-encompassing that the original postulates of the Gdańsk strikers, pushing for free trade unions and the legal right to strike, an end to the repression of independent activists, improvement of health care services, and the increased availability of basic consumer goods and foodstuffs, amongst other things. In these demands, the workers were calling on the government to protect the constitutional rights of the Polish people, and take steps to improve the low standard of living of blue-collar citizens. After weeks of negotiations with Wałęsa and his MKS, the Communist party first secretary Edward Gierek was forced to accede to all twenty-one of the strikers’ demands, signing the Gdańsk Agreement on August 31, which allowed workers the right to strike and organise independent unions.
Read more about this topic: Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee
Famous quotes containing the word negotiations:
“But always and sometimes questioning the old modes
And the new wondering, the poem, growing up through the floor,
Standing tall in tubers, invading and smashing the ritual
Parlor, demands to be met on its own terms now,
Now that the preliminary negotiations are at last over.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)