ABSTRACT
Sympathy strikes were gathering momentum in nearby Gdynia and Sopot, while other yards had come out in Gdansk itself. Playing a clever dividing game, the Lenin management offered three quarters of the pay rise demanded by the strike committee, in the hope that they had split the workers. Realizing that in accepting management’s terms the Lenin Shipyard was abandoning the workers from the enterprises that had come out in support, mounted a barrel, forget about her shyness and begged the strikers not to go home. There was more than one key moment or move in the cycle of events in August, but the decision to found the Inter-factory Strike Committee is definitely one of them. But having achieved that the next hurdle was the modification of the plethora of strike demands that came in from the various enterprises.
