Word: baltic
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Before that dramatic announcement, more than 300,000 workers had gone on strike at 600 industrial enterprises in the northern port city of Gdansk and across the Baltic coast region. Sympathy walkouts had spread to at least a dozen other cities. Strikes also broke out among copper miners and ironworkers in lower Silesia...
...every shop and factory, red-and-white Polish flags fluttered in the faint breeze off the Baltic Sea, giving Gdansk the festive look of a holiday. But traffic was only a trickle of the normal midday rush. At high noon on a working day, the streets were almost empty of people. The only crowd converged on the Lenin Shipyard, the center of the strike and the focal point of the nationwide crisis. TIME Eastern Europe Correspondent Barry Kalb visited the strike scene...
...born speaker," Lech Walesa shouted to hundreds of people gathered outside the gates of the Lenin Shipyard. "I'm just a simple worker, so forgive me if I use simple language." Simple it may be, but it is the language the striking workers of Poland's Baltic coast understand and respond to. In the three weeks since the Gdansk strike began, Walesa (pronounced Vah-wen-sah) has become an authentic hero. Wherever he walked across the idle yard, workers would break into spontaneous applause. A few would run up for his autograph. Each evening when he climbed...
...when bloody riots broke out over food prices and prompted him to join the yard's strike committee. Just before the recurrence of rioting in 1976, he was fired for criticizing national economic policies. In 1979 he joined a group of activist workers who called themselves the Baltic Free Trade Unions. Their goal: an independent trade union. That became the main issue of the current strike after the workers remembered Walesa and successfully demanded that he be rehired. He quickly joined the strike and took the lead in negotiations, forcing an early concession from the shipyard's management...
Apart from flying and trucking reinforcements into the Baltic area, Gierek made no show of armed force. Instead, he appealed for reason and moderation in a 25-minute radio and television address to the nation. He made it clear that many of the strikers' demands were unacceptable. "Strikes will not change things for the better," Gierek said. "They only multiply difficulties." With characteristic frankness, the former miner admitted to "mistakes in economic policy" and a "lack of progress in the organization of production and the life of the community." He promised reforms, such as higher pay, increased meat supplies, more...