Word: shipyarders
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...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 of secession from the party-controlled...
...standard of living. "Despite the painfully obvious problems, the Communist Party seemed to be doing nothing of substance to improve the situation," he recalls. "Intellectuals and dissidents were warning that the people's patience was about at an end." Last week Kalb was back in Poland, talking with shipyard workers in Gdansk, coal miners in Silesia, government ministers and party officials, as the Polish regime struggled to cope with the two-month-old workers' revolt...
...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...
...When the shipyard workers returned to their jobs the next day, garlands of wilting flowers still decorated the gate. But now there was also a new red slogan: WORKERS OF ALL ENTERPRISES-UNITE...