31st August sees the 25th anniversary of the Solidarity movement of Poland. Here a wave of strikes was staged, including some 17 000 workers barricading themselves in the Gdansk Shipyards under the leadership of Lech Walesa. It was a short time thereafter in which a coordinated effort enabled strikes to spread elsewhere. Within a week Walesa and union leaders presented Poland's communist government with a list of demands, the basis of the Charter of Workers' Rights which would follow. It included rights to sanctioned free and independent unions with the right to strike, together with greater...