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The present study explains the difference in labor militancy between the Soviet Union and Poland by examining causes and patterns of labor strikes in the two countries. Instead of attributing the difference in labor militancy between the two countries to the different conditions of “shop-floor politics,” this study employs a strategy of a macro-level approach to labor strikes, and examined the association of strikes with fluctuations in workers’ real consumption. On this basis, this paper attempts to capture the nature of the “social contract” between the regime and labor in the communist state. The main arguments of this paper can be summarized as follows. In both countries the primary cause of labor protests was the downfall of workers’ real consumption. The primary cause of the difference in labor militancy between the two countries lay in different degrees of fluctuations in the workers’ real consumption. Frustration of rising expectation such as sharp downfall of worker’s real wage repeatedly led directly to regime-labor confrontations in Poland. In contrast, the Soviet leadership localized labor disputes while avoiding a sharply rising expectation among workers and by maintaining a stable increase in workers’ consumption at the national level. The comparison of the two countries confirms that the legitimacy of communist rule was based mainly on the economic performance of the regime. The higher level of workers’ militancy in Poland was due to the lower level of the Polish regime’s economic performance i.e. the failure to keep the “social contract.” The labor quiescence continued in the Soviet Union thanks to the regime’s capacity to provide the workers with economic security and steady increase in the standard of living, particularly during the Brezhnev leadership.

Labor Strike in Communist Society: A Comparison between the Soviet Union and Poland