Transforming Worlds of Work
Transforming Worlds of Work

Post-1989 Privatization in Poland through the Eyes of Factory Workers

Summary/Abstract: The subject of this review is the monograph "Cięcia: Mówiona historia transformacji" [Cuts: An Oral History of the Transformation] (Warszawa, Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej 2020) by Aleksandra Leyk and Joanna Wawrzyniak. The book is the output of a larger project conducted at the University of Warsaw between 2010 and 2018. The project gathered the life stories of workers of initially socialist enterprises in Poland, which were then privatized through foreign direct investment in the 1990s. The review argues that although the volume lacks a comprehensive analytical and interpretive framework, the highly readable oral histories that form the core of the book are an invaluable historical source in themselves. The review briefly compares the book to the somewhat similar publication "Telling the Great Change" (eds. Kaja Kaźmierska and Katarzyna Waniek, Łódź 2020), which attempts to capture the experience of the post-1989 systemic transformations in Poland on three generational cohorts, using the sociological method of biographical research. While the latter publication offers a robust conceptual framework, "Cuts" leaves the burden of interpretation to the reader. Both approaches, the reviewer suggests, are valid and complement one another. The value of Leyk and Wawrzyniak’s monograph lies in creating a rich historical source that does not offer clear-cut answers and demonstrates the complexity of lived experience in an era of rapid modernization, both socialist and capitalist.

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