WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Alina Pienkowska, a founding member of Poland's Solidarity labor union and a crucial figure in the 1980 Gdansk shipyard strike that launched its struggle against communism, has died. She was 50.

Pienkowska died of cancer Oct. 17 at a hospital in the Baltic Sea port of Gdansk, Solidarity spokesman Dariusz Wasielewski said Monday.

In the 1970s, Pienkowska joined a clandestine anti-communist labor organization in Gdansk, the Free Trade Unions, where she met future Solidarity founder Lech Walesa and Bogdan Borusewicz, whom she married in 1983. The group published an underground bulletin, Robotnik Wybrzeza, or Worker of the Coast.

Working as a nurse in the shipyard clinic when Gdansk workers laid down their tools on Aug. 14, 1980, Pienkowska is credited with getting word of the strike to the outside world.

With all telephone lines to the yard cut off by authorities except those in the shipyard clinic where she worked as a nurse, she called fellow dissident Jacek Kuron, who spread the news across Poland - launching a strike wave in hundreds of factories.

Two days later, Pienkowska was one of a handful of activists who persuaded the strikers to continue their protest, despite promises of improved working conditions that satisfied some workers.

On Aug. 31, under pressure from the walkouts, communist authorities signed an agreement with the strikers, legalizing Solidarity and promising to ease political restrictions. Pienkowska was one of the authors of the agreement.

She remained an underground Solidarity activist after the martial law crackdown by Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski's government a year later, and she was one of Solidarity's regional leaders in Gdansk for a decade.

"She was a great, heroic woman in the (anti-communist) struggle. You could always count on her," Walesa, who later became Poland's president, said of Pienkowska in a telephone interview Monday. "We will miss her in today's difficult times."

Born Jan. 12, 1952, Pienkowska stayed in politics after Polish communism fell in 1989.

Between 1991 and 1993, she served as a member of Poland's Senate on the Solidarity ticket. But she and her husband later joined the smaller Freedom Union, the center-right party of post-communist Poland's first independent Prime Minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki. In 1998, she became a member of Gdansk's city council.

Pienkowska is survived by her husband, her daughter, Kinga, and son, Sebastian.