[2] In the same period, the central planning system yielded impressive gains in the education level and living standards for much of the new urban industrial workforce.
[3] However, by the 1970s and 1980s, critical national health indicators showed many negative trends, as economic conditions deteriorated, which, combined with small wages in the medical system, led to rampant corruption.
Following wartime destruction of homes, and a population which boomed in the 1950s, there were massive housing availability pressures, which were relieved by large-scale infrastructure building, particularly from the Gierek era onwards.
Following World War II, many Poles believed that Poland, unlike other Eastern European countries, did not need an additional phase of terror.
Within years, tens of thousands of Poles had joined the Communist Party as well as the Social Democratic and Trade Union organizations in order to create what they saw as the society of the future.
[citation needed] Founded in the late 1950s, the first workers' councils to voice opinions on industrial policy, based on the "Polish October" of 1956, marked a fundamental change in the social awareness of the working class.
The increasingly literate leadership of these councils, dominated by the rising number of workers that had acquired secondary education, would eventually lead to the formidable labour and professional organizations such as KOR and Solidarność that would gradually come to threaten the socialist order.
Despite censorship and administrative interference, the patronage of the state and some leeway left to artistic creativity permitted the development of the Polish film school, theater, arts, music and literature after destalinization of 1956.