Word: baltic
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...country's major strikes after two months of labor turmoil. Now the workers were seeking the fruits of their hard-won victory. In Gdansk, the union headed by Lech Walesa, leader of the Lenin Shipyard strike, was already operating out of its new headquarters in the busy Baltic port. In the capital, faculty members of Warsaw University were organizing a teachers' union. The Szczecin-based board of the Polish seamen and dockworkers was planning to submit a motion of secession from the party-controlled Central Council of Trade Unions (C.R.Z.Z...
...week had begun with life in the Baltic port of Gdansk getting back to normal. Before dawn, city trams and buses began their rounds through the chilly, rainswept streets. Workers filed through factory gates. Dockers started to unload the dozens of ships stacked up in the harbor. As seagulls wheeled and cried overhead, the multicolored cranes at Lenin Shipyard arced through the air hauling heavy metal parts. Indeed, it almost seemed as if nothing much had changed since 16,000 shipyard workers had walked off the job and occupied the sprawling complex for 18 days...
...reality, all of Poland had been shaken. The Lenin Shipyard strike had transformed a series of scattered protests over rising meat prices into a workers' crusade for sweeping economic and political reforms. From its nerve center in Gdansk, the movement quickly swept the Baltic coast, spread southward, and finally reached deep into the coal-mining heartland of Silesia. Before the strikes had ended, some 500,000 workers at over 500 enterprises had joined the peaceful but crippling revolt. The work stoppages had cost hundreds of millions of dollars, pushing the country to the brink of disaster and testing...
...watched a surreal spectacle: a Communist government at first denouncing, then publicly negotiating with, its own rebellious workers. No less remarkable was the display of discipline, organization and shrewd negotiating skills provided by the Gdansk-based Interfactory Strike Committee (MKS) that became the bargaining agent for over 400 Baltic enterprises. Most astounding of all were the agreements that finally ended the major strikes. In addition to pay raises and increased social benefits, Gierek's regime had granted -on paper at least-a spate of political concessions unprecedented anywhere in a Communist country: independent, worker-run trade unions, a legal...
...fact, the government's back-to-work campaign was not yet complete. No sooner had workers on the Baltic coast and most other regions returned to their jobs than the scattered coal miners' strikes in Silesia mushroomed into a new potential crisis. Among Poland's best paid and most coddled workers, the miners had remained aloof from the riots of 1970 and 1976. Their burgeoning unrest last week was all the more alarming to Warsaw since coal and lignite provide 85% of Poland's energy and 15% of its hard-currency export earnings. The upheaval...