History of Solidarity History of Solidarity The history of Solidarity (, pronounced ), a Polish non-governmental trade union, began on August 14, 1980, at the Lenin Shipyards (now Gdańsk Shipyards) at its founding by Lech Wałęsa and others. In the early 1980s, it became the first independent labor union in a Soviet-bloc country. Solidarity gave rise to a broad, non-violent, anti-communist social movement that, at its height, claimed some 9.4 million members. It is considered to have contributed greatly to the fall of communism. Poland's communist government attempted to destroy the union by instituting martial law in 1981, followed by several years of
Workers Solidarity Movement Workers Solidarity Movement The Workers Solidarity Movement is an anarchist-communist organisation in Ireland, identifying itself as broadly within the platformist tradition of Nestor Makhno. The organisation was established in 1984 and publishes the magazine "Irish Anarchist Review". The Workers Solidarity Movement was founded at a meeting in Cork in 1984 as the culmination of discussions in Belfast, Cork and Dublin by a number of unaligned anarchists and anarchist groups from Ballymena, Belfast, Cork and Dublin on the need for a national anarchist organisation. After an initial period of very modest growth it split in the late 1980s, with some Cork