Word: trade-union
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Suddenly last week, the inconceivable happened. After a spate of parliamentary maneuvering by the Solidarity trade-union movement, President Wojciech Jaruzelski, who smashed Solidarity in 1981 and interned its leader, Lech Walesa, along with more than 6,000 other members, was forced to turn to his foes to form a government. Jaruzelski asked Tadeusz Mazowiecki, 62, a Solidarity lawyer and journalist, to become the first non-Communist Prime Minister in the Soviet bloc since 1948 and to head up a ruling coalition...
Rather than joining the Communists, Walesa said, he told Jaruzelski that Solidarity should be permitted to form its own government. The trade-union movement earned that right, the union leader declared, with its dramatic June 4 election victory, in which its candidates captured all 161 seats that were open to it in the 460-seat Sejm, or lower house, and 99 of the 100 seats in the Senate. Said he: "The only sensible decision would be to give power to those forces that have the support of the majority of the electorate...
...there were any doubts about the overwhelming rejection of the Communist party by Polish voters earlier this month, they were firmly dispelled last week. By the end of the second round of sparsely attended balloting, the Solidarity trade-union movement had confirmed its victory by winning 99 seats in the 100-member Senate and all 161 opposition seats in the 460-seat Sejm, the lower house, where 299 places had been set aside in advance for the Communist alliance...
Although Communist party leader General Wojciech Jaruzelski has attempted to draw Solidarity into a coalition, the trade-union movement insists it will remain in opposition until completely free elections are held. Solidarity has agreed to cooperate on pressing matters such as economic reform, but seems unlikely to support Jaruzelski's candidacy for the newly created presidency. Solidarity is hoping that the Communist party will avoid a showdown on the presidency by nominating someone other than Jaruzelski. Said an aide to Lech Walesa: "There has to be someone they can put up who is acceptable to both sides...
...Some ninth- and tenth-graders are choosing their own elective courses. Rote learning, long the mainstay of education for the 42 million students in the nation's 130,000 schools, is beginning to yield to free debate. Like America's system of local school boards, councils made up of trade-union and party members, parents and students have been created to give people more control over their children's classrooms. Boring textbooks that only timidly touched upon the terrors of Stalin have been withdrawn. Until new textbooks become available, articles from newspapers, enlivened by the candor of glasnost, serve...