Word: walesa
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...demands to fit realities. "The government signed everything we put in front of them," says Stanislaw Zawada, a member of Solidarity's national commission. "Now it is impossible to count all these agreements. We must begin to analyze them to see which ones can be carried out." As Walesa put it in an interview with BBC-TV last week: "If we go on strike now, we'll destroy ourselves and the economy." Nonetheless, dockers on the Baltic coast and employees of the LOT national airline were threatening new strikes this week...
...major moderating influence over the union during the past year has been the Roman Catholic hierarchy, especially the late Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, the primate of Poland. A trusted adviser to Walesa, Wyszynski helped mediate settlements of some potentially disastrous labor-government confrontations. The hierarchy has made some significant gains of its own, such as getting the right to broadcast Sunday Mass and erect new churches. Still, some observers feel that the church's political effectiveness may be diminished as other popular institutions develop within Poland. But Kania, who last week praised the country's religious leaders...
Strikes. Economic debacle. Invasion jitters. It might seem at a quick glance that nothing much had changed in Poland since those turbulent days last summer, when an obscure electrician named Lech Walesa clambered over the gates of Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk to take control of a burgeoning national strike. In reality almost everything is different. The 1980 strikes shook the Communist world to its roots, engendering the Soviet bloc's first independent trade union, Solidarity, and launching a far-reaching process of reform and re-examination called odnowa (renewal...
Solidarity, meanwhile, must decide what it wants to become now that its existence is firmly established: a trade union or a de facto political party? Radicals in the membership are urging the latter, but Walesa has called for a return to pure unionism. Solidarity's first annual congress next month will seek to resolve these contradictory impulses...
...economic crisis. The queues are even longer - and the shelves emptier - than they were a year ago. Unless the workers scale back their demands, there seems to be little chance for national recovery. "If this continues, those who applauded us in August 1980 will be throwing stones at us," Walesa admonished at a Solidarity meeting in Gdansk last week. That would be a rude awakening indeed from the dream of odnowa...