Poland It's Back to Work We Go

By Scott MacLeod

After two weeks of growing tensions, the mood inside the Lenin shipyard in Gdansk suddenly brightened. Clad in scruffy trousers and jackets, some of the workers occupying the facility joked with one another and guzzled soft drinks. As the afternoon sun beat down on the Baltic port, 3,000 men gathered to sing the Polish national anthem. Then the gates of the shipyard swung open and the throng poured into the streets, marking the beginning of the end of the worst labor unrest to shake Poland since 1981.

The shipyard workers voted to end their strike following an emotional appeal from Lech Walesa, leader of the outlawed Solidarity union and an electrician at the facility. They were followed by steel-mill employees in Stalowa Wola and coal-mine workers in Jastrzebie, where the latest round of labor troubles began on Aug. 16. The last to settle were port and public transport employees in Szczecin, who abandoned their strikes around noon on Saturday.

Walesa acted just hours after he achieved a breakthrough in his relations with the Communist regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski. He held three hours of talks in Warsaw with Interior Minister General Czeslaw Kiszczak, the first time senior Polish officials have granted Walesa a role in the nation's affairs since 1981, when they imposed martial law, suppressed Solidarity and put the union leader in detention. Kiszczak said if the strikes were halted, the regime would set up a round table for serious negotiations on the economy, presumably including workers' demands for better wages, housing and food stocks.

Walesa risked his credibility by calling for an end to the strikes, which had attracted broad sympathy. But in return, Walesa obtained a pledge from Kiszczak that could revive the union leader's power and the diminishing influence of Solidarity: the regime agreed to discuss during the round-table talks lifting the ban on Solidarity, which Walesa founded in 1980 as the first independent trade union in the Communist bloc.

Shipyard workers generally greeted the news triumphantly. But some youthful militant strikers, dubbed the "young savages," were sharply critical that Walesa failed to get a firm commitment that Solidarity will be legalized again. "I have obtained over 100% of what was possible with what strength I have," said Walesa amid disapproving whistles during a speech at the Lenin shipyard. He later told the workers that he chose the "path of agreement" because a repeat of their earlier struggle with the regime could lead to civil war.

Similar fears seem to have spurred Jaruzelski's regime. If Polish officials in fact persuaded Walesa to call off the strikes, they were surprisingly sympathetic to the economic grievances behind them. At a Central Committee meeting, Jaruzelski acknowledged that because of shortages the "daily life of Poles has become not only hard but also demeaning."

A genuine worker-government accord still seems distant. No schedule has been set for the round-table talks. Although Solidarity will probably not be tolerated as a national movement that could challenge the regime's authority once again, the union may eventually be permitted to act on the factory level.

% Jaruzelski's regime is clearly concerned about the new generation of strikers, who seem to care less about Walesa's fame than about getting better living conditions as quickly as possible. Admitted Wladyslaw Baka, the Central Committee secretary responsible for economic affairs: "No agreements, no reconciliation, no discussions will help us unless we can achieve visible results in improving our economy." Given the pathetic state of Poland's economy, that will be a difficult task even without the drain of further labor unrest.

With reporting by Tadeusz Kucharski/Warsaw and Gertraud Lessing/Vienna