Word: lech
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tractor factory near Warsaw boastfully announced that 50% to 80% of the workers in his sector had signed up for the new unions. A burly miner from the Silesian coal fields, on the other hand, complained of official harassment against efforts to organize his mine. The familiar figure of Lech Walesa, 37, the triumphant leader of the original Lenin Shipyard strike, rose to make a telling disclosure. During a recent trip to Warsaw, he recounted, the authorities had in effect tried to buy him off by offering him the leadership of the party-controlled official trade union-a lure...
...government in a series of extraordinary strike settlements. Negotiated separately in Gdansk, Szczecin and Jastrzebie, the accords had ended the 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...
...brown apartment building across town, meanwhile, Lech Walesa arrived with a bunch of gladioli and a large crucifix to open up the temporary union headquarters. He stretched out his hands, looked skyward and proclaimed: "I am in an empty room, but one full of hope." Walesa said that he and the other members of the Gdansk strike committee would serve as interim officers until elections can be held; but he confessed that no one yet knows how the new unions will operate. The settlement stipulated that any worker could choose to remain in the old party-controlled unions and even...
...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...
Last week, during a subcommittee-level bargaining session, Walesa strolled to the gate to bring those outside up to date. Surrounded by bodyguards and a gaggle of photographers and television cameramen, he looked like a U.S. political candidate on the prowl for votes. "Ladies and gentlemen, Lech Walesa," a man with a microphone announced, and the crowd let go with a lusty "hip, hip, hurrah!" Walesa told the crowd that although the government was trying to undermine the workers, "your strike committee is participating fully in your strike, and in your effort for a victory...