Word: walesa
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...factory near Warsaw boastfully announced that 50% to 80% of the workers in his sector had signed up for the new unions. A burly miner from the Silesian coal fields, on the other hand, complained of official harassment against efforts to organize his mine. The familiar figure of Lech Walesa, 37, the triumphant leader of the original Lenin Shipyard strike, rose to make a telling disclosure. During a recent trip to Warsaw, he recounted, the authorities had in effect tried to buy him off by offering him the leadership of the party-controlled official trade union-a lure...
...favored a loose advisory body. A closed-door session finally produced a compromise: a national " coordinating committee" whose member unions will retain their own decision-making powers but will adopt uniform statutes and register as a group with the Warsaw district court. To no one's surprise, Lech Walesa was elected chairman...
...series of extraordinary strike settlements. Negotiated separately in Gdansk, Szczecin and Jastrzebie, the accords had ended the country's major strikes after two months of labor turmoil. Now the workers were seeking the fruits of their hard-won victory. In Gdansk, the union headed by Lech Walesa, leader of the Lenin Shipyard strike, was already operating out of its new headquarters in the busy Baltic port. In the capital, faculty members of Warsaw University were organizing a teachers' union. The Szczecin-based board of the Polish seamen and dockworkers was planning to submit a motion of secession from...
Back in Warsaw, another high-level meeting took place last week between leaders of two important power blocs: the workers and the Roman Catholic Church. At the invitation of Stefan Cardinal Wyszynski, Labor Leader Walesa attended a private Mass at the chapel of the Primate's palace, followed by a meeting in the Cardinal's apartments. The invitation was widely interpreted as an attempt by Wyszynski to mend fences with the workers, many of whom felt that he had failed to support them adequately during the strikes. The workers were especially disappointed by the Cardinal...
...brown apartment building across town, meanwhile, Lech Walesa arrived with a bunch of gladioli and a large crucifix to open up the temporary union headquarters. He stretched out his hands, looked skyward and proclaimed: "I am in an empty room, but one full of hope." Walesa said that he and the other members of the Gdansk strike committee would serve as interim officers until elections can be held; but he confessed that no one yet knows how the new unions will operate. The settlement stipulated that any worker could choose to remain in the old party-controlled unions and even...