Anna Walentynowicz – 1929-2010
Saturday, April 10th, 2010Whilst today’s terrible plane crash is obviously being reported from the perspective of the loss of the Polish President Lech Kaczynski – one of the leading figures of Poland’s Law and Order Party (the nationalist, and severely homophobic, former governing party, which sits with the Tories’ far right friends in Europe), also on the plane was the 80 year old Anna Walentynowicz.
In 1980, Anna was coming up for retirement in the shipyards of Gdansk, where she’d worked for 30 years as a welder and crane operator. She’d become disillusioned with Polish communism, after seing how it restricted workers’ rights to organise, and she took up editorship of the propaganda flyer, “The Coastal Worker”, campaigning against sexism in work,corruption in management and the government licensed trade unions, and in favour of the country’s free trade union movement. (more…)
