A demonstration under the slogan 'Enough of the strike ban! Time for strong trade unions!' took place on May 1, 2026, in Warsaw. The organizers were three entities: the Workers' Initiative Trade Union (OZZ Inicjatywa Pracownicza), the anarchist collective Rozbrat, and the Social Justice Movement of Piotr Ikonowicz. Left-wing organizations — Akcja Socjalistyczna, Młodzi Razem, Iskra, and Czerwoni — also marked their participation. Several thousand people took part in the march.
The march set off promptly at noon from the Sejm of the Republic of Poland and proceeded through the streets of Warsaw. The main demand was clear: the abolition of the 1991 Act on the Resolution of Collective Disputes — and it is worth pausing here, because the history of this act is darker than one might assume from its neutrally sounding title.
Act from the Martial Law Period
The law against which the march participants demonstrated did not come out of nowhere. Its roots go back to Article 14 of the martial law decree of December 12, 1981, which directly suspended the right to strikes and protest actions. When systemic reforms began in 1989, the same intellectuals who had previously supported Solidarity led the changes — and instead of abolishing Jaruzelski's anti-strike restrictions, they enacted a 'new' act in 1991, which, with a few minor terminological changes, repeated the entire procedure. As OZZiP summarizes: provisions that yesterday protected Jaruzelski's dictatorship today stand guard over the dictatorship of employers.
As a result, Poland today has the most restrictive strike law in the entire European Union. For comparison: in France, even two employees can declare a strike without any support from a union organization and are protected by law. In Germany, a strike is treated as a last resort, but the right to associate and collective bargaining is much more widely guaranteed. In Poland, union activity is sometimes treated almost like a crime.
The Path to a Legal Strike
For employees in Poland to legally strike, they must go through four consecutive stages: presenting demands, negotiations, mediation — and finally a strike referendum, in which at least 50% of all employees in each company's establishment in the country must participate. This last requirement is, in the case of large corporations like Amazon, Kaufland, or Dino, a practical impossibility — warehouse workers want to strike, but office workers also vote on the strike; nurses want to strike, but doctors decide on their strike. The procedure lasts for months, and each stage serves the same purpose: it gives the employer time to identify union leaders and fire them, conduct anti-union propaganda, and demobilize the workforce. As OZZiP notes: in practice, the strike referendum is usually not the last stage preceding the strike, but rather the final blockade of the strike.
Therefore, the organizers put forward two specific demands. First: the abolition of the strike referendum requirement. Second: the separation of the strike from the collective dispute resolution procedure — so that dialogue and mediation can take place in parallel with the strike action, not as a condition of its legality. Participants emphasized that 'democracy begins at the workplace' and without strong trade unions, dialogue with the employer is not equal.
The organizers announced further actions on May 23, 2026, in Warsaw — on the 35th anniversary of the enactment of the contested act.
Margins
This year, it was the largest — one could say the only — May Day demonstration in the capital. At one point, our editors noticed a separate column: a dozen or so people carrying banners of the niche organization 'Historia Czerwona' and the delegalized Communist Party of Poland. It is hard to call it anything other than a walk — especially since the numerical trend of this group is clearly declining year by year. The walk missed the main demonstration, after which its participants joined the march, apparently disappointed by their own turnout.
The matter took a more serious turn, however. Among the participants of the Historia Czerwona walk were individuals identifying as 'national socialists,' referring to the left wing of the NSDAP — with their own flag. In unofficial communication with Piotr Ciszewski, we learned that they were warned not to do anything stupid, but despite their clear identification, they were not excluded from the demonstration.
In the same walk, there was a group carrying a modified flag of Democratic Kampuchea — a country that from 1975 to 1979 pursued a policy of total terror, leading to the death of about a million of its own citizens. Piotr Ikonowicz, in an unofficial conversation, explicitly stated that RSS does not want to have anything to do with this group — both because of the views of the participants in the Historia Czerwona walk and the presence of flags with the hammer and sickle.
Editorial Comment: Piotr Ciszewski seems to have harbored clear jealousy towards Ikonowicz for years, with whom he unsuccessfully tries to compete for a position on the far left.
