Word: silesia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...factory sirens began to wail at 8 a.m., and for the next four hours all Poland held its breath. In Warsaw, trams and buses draped with red-and-white national flags sat idle in their barns. In Silesia, brawny coal miners folded their arms and refused to descend into the mines. In the Baltic port of Gdansk, where last summer's strikes first launched Poland on its present, breathtakingly dangerous course, shipyard workers laid down their welding torches and rivet guns...
...near the Czech border, 60,000 workers in 120 factories, including the assembly line for Polish Fiats, stopped work to demand the firing of the provincial governor and three other officials for corruption and mismanagement. Workers in 70 coal mines and industrial plants in the Bytom region in Upper Silesia struck to protest government failure to honor many of the agreements it made with Solidarity last autumn. In the Lower Silesian city of Jelenia Gora, 250,000 workers staged a general strike on Friday to dramatize then- disaffection with inept local Communist officials...
...national commission passed a defiant resolution calling for a five-day week by declaring Saturday a nonworking day. Since most Poles are usually required to work a six-day week, this was a provocative departure. Several union locals, representing shipyard workers in Gdansk and Gdynia, coal miners in Silesia, and most of the 16,000 workers at the giant Ursus tractor factory outside Warsaw, threatened to force the demand by not showing up for work on Saturday. The Ministry of Labor, Wages and Social Affairs responded by instructing factory managers to dock the pay of workers who did not report...
...three hours the crowd swelled with new arrivals: miners from Silesia wearing their traditional long black coats and plumed czaka, railway workers from Lublin, bus drivers from Pulawy. Hundreds of thousands strong, they spilled out into side streets, waiting patiently in the early twilight while the tender strains of a Chopin piano concerto wafted from a loudspeaker. They had come to Gdansk to honor the memory of 45 workers killed by police and army bullets ten years before in riots along the Baltic coast. At long last a monument had been built: three slender trunks of steel crowned by crosses...
...major confrontation in Warsaw, the increasingly militant workers are plainly in no mood to pussyfoot. In two towns last week they occupied government offices. Textile employees also walked off the job in Lodz, and pay disputes interrupted operations at a reported 30 coal mines in the industrial region of Silesia. Commuter lines in Warsaw and Gdansk were briefly shut down when railway workers and the government clashed over how to distribute $6.3 million in pay raises. TASS, the official Soviet news agency, warned that "the threat of a general transport strike . . . could affect Poland's national and defense interests...