She became one of the leaders of a massive strike at the Lenin Shipyard that winter, helping to shut down the vast plant in protest of the price hikes and the regime’s brutalityencyclopedia.com. The workers’ revolt was met with violence – government forces opened fire on the protesters, killing dozens – but it also forced change at the top. The party boss, Władysław Gomułka, was replaced by Edward Gierek, who promised a new approach. In late January 1971, Walentynowicz was among a delegation of strikers’ representatives who met with Gierek face-to-faceencyclopedia.comencyclopedia.com. During those negotiations, the workers wrested substantial concessions, including wage increases and promises of reform, from the chastened authoritiesencyclopedia.com. It was a rare moment of validation for the idea that ordinary workers, acting in unity, could compel an ostensibly omnipotent regime to listen.
Walentynowicz’s activism only deepened after 1970. She insisted on honoring the fallen workers of that bloody December, helping to organize illegal commemorative ceremonies on the first anniversary of the massacre despite government bansencyclopedia.com. Meanwhile, Poland’s brief period of “Gierek-era” liberalization and economic hope was fading by the mid-1970s. Once again prices rose and discontent simmered. In June 1976, strikes and street protests broke out in cities like Radom and Ursus when another round of price increases was announcedencyclopedia.com. This time, something new happened: intellectuals and dissident thinkers in Warsaw and other cities reached out to aid the beaten and fired workers. They formed KOR – the Komitet Obrony Robotników (Workers’ Defense Committee) – to provide legal and material support to persecuted laborers and to document regime abusesencyclopedia.com.
Walentynowicz became a crucial bridge between these dissident intellectual circles and the Baltic coast workers. She opened her humble Gdańsk apartment to underground meetings, creating a rare space where workers and opposition intellectuals could strategize together. At one such meeting in the late 1970s, she first met a fired shipyard electrician named Lech Wałęsa, who would soon become a household nameencyclopedia.com. Walentynowicz immediately recognized Wałęsa’s charisma and leadership qualities, but also sensed that their strong personalities might clash. “I felt that we wouldn’t see eye to eye,” she later remarked, an intuition that proved prescientencyclopedia.com.
By 1978, Walentynowicz formally joined an illegal group that grew out of the KOR networks: the Free Trade Unions of the Coast (Wolne Związki Zawodowe Wybrzeża, WZZ)en.wikipedia.org. Along with Wałęsa and a handful of other militant workers on the Baltic seaboard, she began publishing and distributing an underground newsletter called Robotnik Wybrzeża (“Coastal Worker”)en.wikipedia.org. In these samizdat papers – typed and copied in secret – they reported on workplace abuses, government censorship, and the everyday struggles of Polish laborers. Walentynowicz often slipped copies of the illegal bulletin into the shipyard, even handing them directly to her Communist bosses to shame them with the truththeguardian.com. Such audacity did not go unnoticed by the secret police (SB). They watched her closely, subjecting her to frequent interrogations and searches of her homeinstytutpolski.pl. At one point in 1978, the SB detained Walentynowicz and attempted to recruit her as an informant – promising her a better job, a nicer apartment, even foreign travel if she would cooperateencyclopedia.com. Walentynowicz flatly refused. Her life “isn’t worth much” if she betrayed her principles, she told the officers, defiantly adding that their threats meant nothing to her nowencyclopedia.com. Intimidated by her resolve, the agents released her, but the harassment continued. On another occasion she was beaten during an arrest – kicked in the legs so severely that a doctor ordered her off work for several daysencyclopedia.comencyclopedia.com. None of it cowed her. Walentynowicz’s tiny apartment remained a hub of opposition activity, her nom de guerre “Anna” appearing on countless petitions and open letters demanding rights for workers. As one chronicler observed, she had become an exemplary worker-turned-dissident – a steadfast Catholic who believed profoundly in social justice and was willing to sacrifice her own safety for the dignity of othersen.wikipedia.orginstytutpolski.pl.
By the end of the 1970s, Poland was sliding into economic crisis again – rising debt, shortages of basic goods, and a regime increasingly fearful of unrest. In 1979, Walentynowicz and her compatriots in the WZZ helped draft a bold document known as the Charter of Workers’ Rights, published in the underground pressencyclopedia.com.
Signed by over a hundred prominent dissidents and workers (including both Walentynowicz and Wałęsa), the charter catalogued the needs of Poland’s working class,