Word: walesa
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...hate strikes," Union Leader Lech Walesa told a group of journalists last week. That remarkable statement by the organizer of last summer's mass shipyard strike was symptomatic of the conspicuous spirit of conciliation that both labor and government strained to maintain as Poland's year of peril came to a close. Communist Party Boss Stanislaw Kania demonstratively placed wreaths on monuments that had been erected in the northern port cities of Gdansk and Gdynia to honor workers killed by police and troops in 1970. Kania's gesture was of high symbolic importance, since it signified...
...supreme court postponed a ruling on the right of Poland's 3.2 million private farmers to form their own union, thus defusing a new crisis. The farm leaders were jubilant over the court's apparent readiness to study ways of legalizing a Rural Solidarity movement patterned on Walesa's Solidarity. Only last September the Warsaw district court had ruled that Poland's private farmers were not entitled to a union, on the ground that they are self-employed. Angered by that earlier decision, farmers had threatened to withhold their produce from government markets, a move that...
...Walesa insists that he is simply a "union man" and not a politician. Yet the labor upheaval that toppled Party Boss Edward Gierek also made Solidarity's leader one of Poland's three most powerful people. The other two-new Party Boss Stanislaw Kania and Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, spiritual leader of Poland's 32 million Catholics-now confer with this diminutive union man almost as if he were a high state official. Walesa takes his dizzying rise to eminence in stride. Says he: "I am not concerned with fame in the least. I have...
...only a few weeks before had threatened a deadly holiday for the U.S.S.R.'s nettlesome neighbor. The turmoil-weary nation enjoyed a calm but austere Christmas, free for the moment from the testy confrontations between the authorities and the independent new Solidarity unions led by Worker-Hero Lech Walesa. Thanks to a last-minute rationing plan, stores in many areas were stocked with requisite hams and trimmings for Christmas dinners, though lines were still long...
...prime concern is upholding the faith and Catholic institutions. Above all, it does not want to risk an intervention by the Soviets, who might try to stamp out religious rights. The church's censure of Kuron could aggravate a split between moderates and militants in Solidarity. Walesa, himself a moderate, has resisted all efforts to disavow the dissidents so far. Nevertheless, grumbling about his supposed timidity has increased among union militants. "The clergy has an important influence on him," says one unionist, "and I'm not sure it's a wise...