area, coordinating action and maintaining and order to ensure the safety of the strikers. Lech Wałęsa, an electrician who had lost his job at the Gdańsk Shipyard in the strikes of 1976 was elected as chair of the MKS, while the remainder of the committee was composed of delegates from other facilities including Bogdan Lis, Andrzej Gwiazda, and others. By August 18, the MKS represented workers from 156 separate enterprises, and the number was steadily growing. Just two days after the formation of MKS the Polish economy was brought to a standstill as workers struck at factories and ports all along the Baltic coast. By August 21, much of the country was affected by strikes, even including the inland mines of the Upper Silesian Industrial Area, as more and more workers joined independent unions. The Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee at Gdańsk was becoming the national center for trade union movement: a phenomenon which was itself unique to this series of events. In the strikes of the 1950s and '70s it was the lack of a central organized structure that had limited the mobilization potential of striking workers. Now the MKS had been specifically designed with this problem in mind - the decentralization of the workers' movement – and was working for the first time to unify and strengthen the movement, coordinating strikes all across Poland. It was for this reason that the government of Edward Gierek found they could no longer buy off strikers with small concessions, and finally had to settle into heavy negotiations with the MKS. Negotiations On the day that the committee was formed, August 17, MKS posted a handwritten list of twenty-one demands in the shipyard. These demands were far broader and all-encompassing that the original postulates of the Gdańsk strikers, pushing for free trade unions and the legal right to strike, an end to the repression of independent activists, improvement of health care services, and the increased availability of basic consumer goods and foodstuffs, amongst other things. In these demands, the workers were calling on the government to protect the constitutional rights of the Polish people, and take steps to improve the low standard of living of blue-collar citizens. After weeks of negotiations with Wałęsa and his MKS, the Communist party first secretary Edward Gierek was forced to accede to all twenty-one of the strikers' demands, signing the Gdańsk Agreement on August 31, which allowed workers