As a result of the strike in Lublin, the city was "virtually shut down", and Jagielski led a delegation to the city which was able to ease tension there. Gdańsk became the focal point of the strike movement. On 21 August 1980, Mieczysław Jagielski replaced Tadeusz Pyka to lead a Polish government commission which was negotiating with strikers there. The strikers were represented by the Inter-Enterprise Strike Committee, which was demanding that the workers it represented be given better rights, including better rights to strike. On 26 August meeting with representatives of the strikers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Jagielski promised that the right to strike would be added to a new law on the official trade unions of Poland. After 5 more days of difficult negotiations, a settlement was reached between the strikers and the government, known as the Gdańsk agreement. Norman Davies contends that Jagielski "in the end realised that only two alternatives remained [to a general government victory in the negotiations]-either agreement on the strikers' terms or an immediate resort to force for which the government was not prepared." The agreement, as well as giving the workers of the Lenin Shipyard the right to strike, also allowed them to form their own independent trade union. Jagielski said of the negotiations that led to the agreement, "We have spoken as Poles to Poles...There are no winners and losers. The important thing here is that we have understood each other and the best guarantee for what we have done is hard work." He was reported to have spoken eloquently. In October 1980, he interacted with a delegation of Solidarity members that included Lech Wałęsa, future President of the Third Republic of Poland. When Wałęsa complained that the Polish government was not keeping to its promise of allowing the independent labour movement enough of an opportunity to publicize itself, Jagielski indicated that he would try to give the movement better access to the Polish press, and to the Polish radio network. Jagielski led a delegation that went to a meeting in Moscow of Comecon, the Eastern Bloc economic community, during January 1981. That month, the government declared that the poor economy was forcing it to cut back on its promise of ensuring that Polish workers did not have to work on Saturdays, and that it would offer a number of Saturdays as work-free instead. Unrest grew among Polish workers over the government's decision, and Jagielski negotiated with Wałęsa for six hours in the building of the Council of Ministers regarding the Saturday issue.