Word: warsaw
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...Warsaw, meanwhile, newly installed Party Boss Stanislaw Kania moved to restore public confidence and cope with the country's awesome economic problems (see box). Scrapping the economic plan of deposed Party Boss Edward Gierek, the new regime announced that it would slash its 1980 budget by $400 million, mainly from the investment sector, in order to help fund the pay raises that the workers have been promised. Fulfilling another pledge it had made to the strikers, the government this week prepared to resume regular radio broadcasts of the Roman Catholic Sunday Mass, for the first time since the Communists...
...Warsaw does expect to absorb the free trade unions, the defiant delegates who met in Gdansk last week promise to put up a stiff fight. Speaker after speaker denounced attempts by factory managers or local authorities to block the formation of independent unions. The most commonly cited tactic: threatening to cut off the social benefits of workers who join the new organizations. Others mocked promises of internal reform by official union leaders anxious to hold on to their original membership. Still others blasted the government for withholding information about the new unions in the press. Said a bus driver from...
...Baltic coast, where the new unions are already strong, 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...
...network of independent trade unions now being formed represents the wild card in Poland's economic future. "The question," says a West European diplomat in Warsaw, "is whether they will behave like British unions, which are interested only in their own demands, regardless of the cost to the nation, or whether they will, like West German unions, moderate their demands so as not to harm the overall economy." Poles at large were generally aware of that danger. The country's economy, as Communist Party Official Mieczyslaw Rakowski describes it, "already resembles a punching bag hanging from a thin...
...then Gierek's plan ran into a combination of bad luck and hurdles endemic in the Communist system. Recession in the West curbed appetites for Polish exports. Bad harvests forced Warsaw to buy increasing amounts of food abroad. Meanwhile, the government lost control of the development program and had to seek further loans, pushing its hard-currency indebtedness to a staggering $20 billion...