Jiu Valley miners' strike of 1977

The immediate cause of the strike was Law 3/1977 (enacted on 30 June that year), which ended disability pensions for miners and raised the retirement age from fifty to fifty-five.

[1][2] Other issues included the extension of workdays beyond the legal eight hours, low wages, overtime not paid since March, work on Sundays, paycheck deductions for failing to meet production targets, poor living conditions and the leadership's indifference toward their plight.

Before the strike began (and perhaps while it was going on), some miners proposed sending a delegation to the capital, Bucharest, to discuss their problems with the leadership of the Romanian Communist Party, but this option was discarded as they probably thought any split to two locations would fatally undermine their cause.

Booed, insulted and pelted with food scraps, Verdeț and Pană hid behind Dobre and, backed up against the wall of the gatekeeper's booth, nervously begged him to assure their safety.

Dobre insists that the two party functionaries were held hostage in the booth until Ceaușescu's arrival, given only water and monitored in their conversations with Bucharest;[3] other sources confirm this account.

At Verdeț's insistence, he hastily came to Petroșani on 3 August 1977, and 35,000 people (some sources say 40,000)[6] came to see him – to be sure, not all had come to hold a dialogue with him, but went out of curiosity or carried away by events, but the audience was nonetheless impressive in size.

[1][6] Dobre read the list of grievances to Ceaușescu, presenting 26 demands related to work hours, production targets, pensions, supplies, housing and investments.

They asked for a restoration of the status quo ante in social legislation, the guarantee of adequate food supplies and medical care, the establishment of workers' commissions at the enterprise level empowered to dismiss incompetent or corrupt managers, and a pledge of no reprisals against the strikers.

[5] One significant slogan used during the strike was "Down with the proletarian bourgeoisie", which was targeted against the Communist functionaries who administered the Valley and profited from the miners' labour and caused their salaries to be kept down.

[6] The first session of the party's Central Committee after the strike took place on 4 August; it was entirely devoted to discussing the previous days' events and participants were preoccupied with finding someone to blame for what had happened.

[6] The ensuing investigation tried to discover where the core of support for the strike lay, and while some 4,000 workers were moved to other mining areas in the following months, others were said to have ended up in labour camps on the Danube-Black Sea Canal.

The concessions held long enough for the authorities to break the organisational backbone of the resistance, but eventually most of these were withdrawn and the eight-hour workday imposed, though this was not made official until 1983.

At least 600 miners were interrogated; 150 penal dossiers were opened; 50 were hospitalised in psychiatric wards; 15 were sentenced to correctional labour and actually imprisoned, while a further 300 or more (who were considered dangerous) were internally deported.

The area was surrounded by security forces; two helicopters were brought in to monitor happenings and ensure a tight link with Bucharest, although the official reason for their presence was to fly mining accident victims to the hospital.

Strict surveillance was intended to block the flow of any information to the rest of the country or contact with the outside world, yet 22 miners acting on behalf of 800 others managed to send a letter (dated 18 September) to the French newspaper Libération, which published it on 12 October.

[13] The response to the unrest—giving the appearance of acquiescing to the workers' demands and meeting local grievances, then isolating the ringleaders by sending them away or imprisoning them once the strike had ended, and reneging on concessions—established a model for dealing with such incidents in the future.

There was a strict news blackout on such events, but it seems these were peacefully and easily defused given the non-political nature of the demands (poor factory and dormitory conditions) and their timely resolution.

[15] Dobre's fate was long a source of speculation – even the first version of the Tismăneanu Report claimed he had been killed,[16] while others theorised he became a party activist, was put in a mental hospital, etc.

The salient points of his later life are as follows: he and his family were moved to Craiova on August 31, 1977, where they lived until May 1990, in total isolation and under constant Securitate surveillance until December 1989 (over 50 agents informed on him).

During the Revolution, Dobre claims he was hailed by a crowd in Petroșani and appeared on television but was sidelined due to his hostility toward the National Salvation Front, being labelled an "extremist" and a "terrorist", particularly in the Craiova and Jiu Valley newspapers.

Cesereanu considers that the strike offered an "exercise in democracy": for almost three days, miners demanded and protested before a microphone; they spoke freely, none were excluded and no censorship was imposed.

"[3] The strike—probably the first workers' protest since 1958, with the exception of a September 1972 strike in the Jiu Valley[18]—began not as an anti-Communist or even an anti-Ceaușescu movement but rather a socio-economic one in spontaneous reaction to the new pensions law, as confirmed by the miners' inexperience, which led them to improvisation and hasty decision-making.