“The strike didn’t break out because the railway workers went on strike, but because the welded train couldn’t move. And then they actually went on strike, and the strikes spread across all of Poland.” – this is just a fragment of the story that aired on Telewizja Republika during the program Political Coffee. The entire account by the new head of the “Gazeta Polska” Club in Lyon, Andrzej Valenducq, can be heard in the recording above.
Andrzej Valenducq is the new head of the “Gazeta Polska” Club in Lyon, France. During the 9th Congress of “Gazeta Polska” Clubs of Western Europe, he appeared on Political Coffee, where he recounted the story of… his father, an employee of the Lublin Municipal Plants.
In short — a rebellion that sparked a massive strike!
Back to 1980
The strikes commonly associated with August 1980 actually began earlier — in July, in Lublin. Their direct cause was a specific incident. According to a well-known version, railway workers reacted emotionally upon seeing a trainload of meat being transported east and, in protest, welded the tracks shut. This incident triggered a wave of strikes among Lublin’s railway workers, which soon spread to other regions of Poland and eventually reached Gdańsk.
And here’s how it happened…
“My father, who came with me to France, told me this story. He kept it to himself for years — he was afraid to reveal what had happened there. My father worked at the Lublin Meat Plants on Turystyczna Street. He was responsible for maintaining the operation of the production lines,” said Mr. Andrzej. The story strongly suggests that it was, in fact, his father who set off the chain of events that led to the strikes.
He continued:
“My father saw those wagons filled with meat and cans of ham and decided to act. During a night shift, when he was alone (his colleague was working in another part of the plant), he took matters into his own hands. He was a trained locksmith and welder. He thought: the train has iron wheels, the tracks are iron too… So he welded the two together, which meant that when he finished his third shift and the team of railway workers arrived to move the train, they couldn’t get it going. It caused an uproar — and accidentally started a strike!”