Why the Gdańsk Workers Stayed Inside the Gates

In December 1970, shipyard workers in Gdańsk did what angry people usually do. They walked out.

They marched through the city to protest sudden food price rises announced just before Christmas. The regime answered with troops. Dozens of people were killed along Poland’s Baltic coast.

My grandfather was one of the thousands of workers caught up in that strike. I grew up hearing about it. Not quite as a story of heroism, but as a story of what happens when you have right on your side and still lose.

Ten years later, in August 1980, the same shipyard went on strike again. This time the workers did something that looks, at first glance, almost passive.

They stayed put.

Instead of marching on party headquarters, they occupied the yard. They shut the gates, wrote their demands on wooden boards and waited for the government to come to them.

Think about what that changed.

In 1970 the confrontation happened on the street, where the state held every advantage: weapons, numbers, and the ability to call a protest a riot. In 1980 the workers chose the ground. Sending force into a shipyard full of workers, with families passing food over the fence and foreign journalists outside, was a very different decision from clearing a road.

Here’s the strange part. The workers didn’t need cleverer arguments the second time. What changed was where they were standing when they made them.

Most of us prepare for a negotiation by thinking about what we’ll say. The opening number. The argument. The comeback. Very few of us think about the setting: the venue, the timing, who’s watching, who has to travel to whom, who has to make the first move.

But the setting quietly decides which moves are cheap for the other side and which are expensive. In 1980, refusing to negotiate cost the government far more than it had in 1970.

On 31 August 1980 the government signed the Gdańsk Agreement, accepting the workers’ right to form independent trade unions. Solidarity grew out of it.

You probably won’t be facing down a communist regime this week. But you might be asking for a raise, sitting down with a supplier or having a hard conversation at home. Where is it happening? Who chose the place? What’s easy for the other person to do there, and what’s hard?

The lesson my family took from Gdańsk runs right through Marta Skarbek’s This is Negotiation: before you decide what to say, decide where you’re standing.

Is “choose your ground” useful advice for an ordinary negotiation, or does it only work when you’ve got thousands of people standing behind you?

Find the book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Marta-Skarbeks-This-Negotiation-negotiator/dp/B0D7VXFV7S

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