Word: shipyards
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Clambering to the top of the shipyard's high iron gate, the little man with the walrus mustache struck a pose of accustomed authority. With outstretched arms, he waved down the combined cheers of the striking workers behind him and the massed crowd of sympathizers outside the gate, and lifted a microphone to his mouth. This time, however, instead of a rousing exhortation to militancy, his message was a somber admonition: to curtail the spread of further strikes across his nation and give the government the necessary breath a while. "It is not good to have Poland terrorized...
That dramatic juncture in the unfolding epic of Poland's labor crisis last week took place at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk. It showed that the strike leaders had come to recognize the momentous perils and potentially tragic consequences of what they had begun. Their emotional yet disciplined strike for rights, a grass-roots upheaval that was in many ways unprecedented in Moscow's postwar fiefdoms of Eastern Europe, had left Poland teetering on a tightrope...
...week's end strike leaders and government negotiators announced agreement on "a formula designed to bring Poland back from the brink, hundreds of shipyard workers cheered, one of their leaders read a communiqué stating that they would be permitted to form an "independent, self-governing trade union." After speedy approval from the Communist Party Central Committee in Warsaw, the strike leaders indicated that they would order their followers back to work this week...
Serious negotiations got under way on Tuesday in a reception room in the shipyard's red brick conference hall. With scores of Western newsmen looking on through a glass wall, the two teams faced each other over a long, narrow wooden table. A battery of microphones sent their voices echoing out over the shipyard's public address system; portions of the extraordinary negotiations were even broadcast over Gdansk radio...
...them were a number of thoroughly nonproletarian, politically minded intellectuals who have been advising the strikers. Other leaders of the Interfactory Strike Committee sat on rows of benches behind their negotiators, including the prim and bespectacled Anna Walentynowicz, a militant crane operator whose recent dismissal had helped spark the shipyard strike...