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trade unions by size of membership, in thousands, in 1968:

The Communist regime has always regarded the determination of labor policy, including the allocation of manpower resources, as falling legitimately within the purview of state economic planning, although the implementation of central planning in the field of labor has been more inconsistent in Poland than in some other Communist countries. After 1956, for example, the forced and centrally directed allocation of labor along geographical and industrial lines of the Stalinist period was replaced by a flexible system permitting individual enterprises to do their own hiring; this has, in fact, resulted in persistent competition for skilled labor. Overall manpower planning is supervised by the State Planning Commission, with implementation devolving upon the various levels of local government in cooperation with specific enterprises and under the coordination of the Ministry of Labor, Wages and Social Affairs. In addition to being assigned the task of implementing government policies in the areas of productivity, wages, norms, and working conditions, the trade unions have been given increasing responsibility for the administration of social security programs and, together with the Public Health Service, wholly administer and supervise a system of recuperational institutions as well as workers' recreational activities.

In December 1970, much of the workers' ire was directed at the trade union apparatus which, like other facets of the former regime's bureaucracy, had become authoritarian, inflexible, unresponsive to the popular will, and unrepresentative of its membership. These deficiencies were rooted in the basic concept of trade unions under communism. Claiming an identity of interests between the workers and the state, the government acted as final arbiter in all those fields of labor relations and legislation traditionally within the purview of the trade unions and management: hiring practices, wage scales, working conditions, and labor disputes. Polish trade unions, which during the interwar period had a record of effective internal democracy and promotion of the workers' interests, were thus transformed into instruments of state control over the labor force, implementing but not forming policy in the labor field.

With both management and the trade unions being, in effect, component parts of the state machinery for the utilization and exploitation of labor, workers in postwar Poland have made little use of the formal trade union apparatus for raising and remedying their grievances. This apparatus, which consists of regional and basic or enterprise arbitration commissions, equally divided in membership between trade union and management representatives, deals with individual or group grievances concerning such matters as unjust dismissals and wage scales. To bring a grievance before the arbitration commission, however, the individual workers is in practice dependent on the influence and good will of intermediate level supervisors for whom he has little respect; foremen and even shift managers have little real authority outside their immediate production responsibility and tend to be wary of bringing their shop to the potentially adverse attention of the trade union functionaries and management. Skilled workers and workers with good production records, therefore, usually register their complaints directly with the plant manager and generally tend to be spokesmen for the unskilled and below-average producers. In view of the passivity and even obstructionism of the trade union apparatus in dealing with workers' interests, Polish workers have tended to make increasing use of the regular court system, or to organize informally outside the framework of the trade union apparatus and, leapfrogging over its local organs, deal directly with higher echelons of the party machinery.

This tendency of the skilled workers to take matters into their own hands bore fruit during the December 1970 revolt on the Baltic coast, when the formal trade union apparatus was not only ignored but was vocally

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