Word: shipyards
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...table sat First Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Jagielski, 56, whose graying hair and well-cut suit gave him the air of a distinguished Western banker. A tough and experienced negotiator, Jagielski was flanked by a task force that had flown with him from Warsaw three days earlier. Jagielski entered the shipyard through a side gate in order to avoid the antagonistic crowd at the main entrance. Workers stared at Jagielski's team in icy silence, then broke into hearty applause when their own negotiators passed...
...turning point was reached on Thursday, when Walesa suddenly made his dramatic appeal for a temporary halt to new strikes so that the negotiations could continue without an atmosphere of deepening crisis. After descending from atop the shipyard gate and conferring with the Jagielski team, he gave the government negotiators a signed statement declaring, "We are not for the widening of the strikes, which might push the country to the verge of collapse." The government, however, never published that message, presumably because it would have further enhanced Walesa's image and influence...
...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...
...solidarity was one of the strikers' strengths, so was shared religiosity. The shipyard was festooned with pictures of Pope John Paul II and icons of the Virgin Mary. Each day at 5 p.m., hundreds of citizens gathered outside to kneel and hear Mass with the strikers inside. Once a Communist Party member from a nearby factory suddenly grabbed a silver Crucifix and held it aloft. "I swear on this Cross that I am with you," he cried. The Crucifix was later placed on the front wall, slightly higher than the statue of the shipyard's namesake, Nikolai Lenin...
Discipline and organization inside the shipyard were remarkable. Workers with red-and-white armbands were stationed at the gate, screening all who entered. Small trucks that normally haul shipbuilding materials shuttled back and forth with food and drink. Beneath a sign, THANK YOU FOR GOOD WORK, thousands of workers lounged and read a strike newspaper called Solidarity...