Word: walesa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...tour's first stop, after briefings in Washington, was in France, where Lech Walesa, the head of Poland's Solidarity trade union, came to Charles de Gaulle Airport for breakfast with the group. He was questioned closely about Solidarity's program for economic and political renewal. "If things were managed logically," Walesa said, "there would be a quick recovery, because labor understands what it is all about...
...winds whipped around Gdansk's 14th century gothic town hall last week, but the real storm was within. Lech Walesa, 38, faced one of the toughest challenges to his leadership of Solidarity, Poland's independent trade union federation. The occasion: a meeting of Solidarity's 107-member national commission. The task: to react to Walesa's announcement that he would join in an unprecedented tripartite summit meeting with Poland's Premier, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, and Roman Catholic Primate, Archbishop Jozef Glemp. The meeting would consider the country's explosive political and economic plight...
There was no doubt among Solidarity's leaders that Walesa should attend the session. What was at issue was whether he should be authorized to negotiate alone on the behalf of the entire diverse union. "We want democracy, not a dictatorship!" yelled one commission member above the raucous uproar at the meeting. Shouted Radical Jan Rolicz, who is challenging Walesa's current efforts to hold back the organization he helped to found: "The time has come to think about a personnel change in the union, even though Walesa is still a symbol of unity." Jozef Dudek, another radical...
...Echoing Walesa's calls for restraint, Solidarity's national presidium telexed union locals at week's end to demand a halt to wildcat strikes. But the protests continued to spread. In the city of Zyrardow, near Warsaw, 12,000 textile workers entered the third week of a sit-in to demand more food. In Zielona Gora province, 150,000 workers continued their week-old strike to protest the firing of a local Solidarity farm manager. In Tarnobrzeg province, 180,000 stayed off the job because of inadequate food supplies. And in southern Sosnowiec, near Katowice, angry miners...
...supply and distribution bottlenecks that are strangling the economy. Some army teams, for example, uncovered caches of hoarded coal and consumer goods. One patrol forced a state farm to harvest 600 tons of potatoes that would otherwise have rotted in the field. Another fixed a village heating system. Walesa gave the operation a limited endorsement when he told the Zyrardow strikers, "We should make order at the bottom through the army...