From: "Curtis Price" <cansv-AT-igc.apc.org>
Date:          Fri, 14 Jun 1996 19:40:46 +0000
Subject:       POLAND



It's interesting but the Baltimore papers carried a short piece about 

this same action saying that workers had OCCUPIED  the shipyard. . .

Curtis Price


------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date:          Wed, 12 Jun 1996 15:05:47 -0400
From:          NewsHound-AT-sjmercury.com (NewsHound)
To:            cansv-AT-igc.apc.org
Subject:       [65] SOLIDARITY STRIKES AT GDANSK SHIPYARD

Selected by your NewsHound profile entitled "RIOTS". The selectivity 
score was 
65 out of 100.

Solidarity strikes at Gdansk shipyard
GDANSK, Poland (AP) -- Workers began a two-day strike today to 
protest 
government plans to close the failing Gdansk shipyard, birthplace of 
the 
Solidarity labor movement.

Shipyard workers erected a cross at the main gate along with a poster 
listing 
their demands to the government, which owns 60 percent of the 
shipyard.

The strikers want a restructuring plan to save the yard and a 
re-training 
program for any of the 7,300 employees who are laid off.

But even Solidarity founder Lech Walesa, the shipyard worker who 
became Poland's
 first popularly elected president in 1990, says the bankruptcy 
decision 
``cannot be questioned on economic grounds.''

``It is true that the shipyard should have done more in the past few 
years (to 
re-structure), but nobody helped it,'' said Walesa, who lost his 
re-election bid
 in November to former Communist Aleksander Kwasniewski.

But Jerzy Borowczak, Solidarity's leader at the yard, sees a more 
sinister hand 
at work, saying the closure is a continuation of the Communists' 
repression of 
the workers.

``The decision to close down the shipyard is a political act,'' 
Borowczak said.

The 50-year-old Gdansk Shipyard is the first of the big state-owned 
industries 
to go bankrupt since 1989, when a revolution started in the shipyard 
ended four 
decades of communism and central planning in Poland.

The government says debts estimated at $140 million and mounting 
leave it with 
no choice but to close the yard. Part of the staff will be kept for a 
year to 
complete ships now under construction.

The government has blamed the shipyard's sinking finances on unwise 
contracts, 
over-hiring and overly generous benefits, saying other Polish 
shipyards have 
made changes and operate at a profit.

Privatization Minister Wieslaw Kaczmarek says Solidarity acted as a 
``super-management'' of the company, and is to blame for the collapse 
of the 
yard.

``For four years you did not allow for restructuring of this 
enterprise,'' 
Kaczmarek told Borowczak in a radio discussion Tuesday. ``Today you 
are trying 
to hide in the crowd of workers, who are innocent.''

A new shipyard company can be created on the ruins of the old one 
only after the
 bankruptcy procedure is completed, creditors are satisfied and 
contracts 
renegotiated, the minister said. The management board plans to apply 
for 
court-approved bankruptcy.

The difficulties of the shipyard became public in early May, when the 
management
 said it had no money to pay April wages.

Solidarity -- the East Bloc's first free trade union, was born out of 

anti-Communist strikes at the shipyard in August 1980. The yard first 
became the
 stage of worker protests in 1970, when riot police shot and killed 
dozens here.

In 1988, strikes at what was then called the Lenin Shipyard prompted 
a 
nationwide uprising that forced the Communists to cede power.


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