Word: wildcats
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Solidarity chapters threatened immediate wildcat strikes. Posters and graffiti denouncing the beatings appeared across the country. The union demanded that those responsible be dismissed from their jobs. Most union members were convinced that the government, possibly egged on by Moscow, had ordered the beatings to force a showdown with the union. Said a Solidarity official in Bydgoszcz: "It was meant as a provocation to provide an excuse for action against the union." Many foreign analysts concurred. Said a Kremlinologist in the French foreign ministry: "We have no doubt that Bydgoszcz was a deliberate provocation...
...Some 20,000 U.M.W. members have been laid off. Though both sides are prepared to start bargaining again, no talks have been scheduled, and the ugly mood that has marked previous strikes seems to be on the rise. Just the word of the breakdown in negotiations last week sparked wildcat strikes by 8,000 miners in the East and Midwest. As Norvel Wagner, a U.M.W. field representative in West Virginia, put it, "It's itchy feet...
This time the walkouts were a challenge not only to Poland's Communist government, but to Solidarity, the independent labor union forged during last summer's unrest. The wildcat protests threatened to destroy Solidarity's hard-won unity and shatter the delicate detente between the union and the state. "We must stop all the strikes so that the government can say that Solidarity has the situation under control," warned Union Leader Lech Walesa. "We must concentrate on basic issues. There is a fire in the country...
...firebrands at the local level pressed ahead with the wildcat strikes, many of them based on volatile political grievances, thus for the moment relegating Walesa to chasing his movement rather than leading it. Walesa traveled to the southern city of Rzeszow last week, where dissident farmers and workers had occupied a government building to dramatize their demands for Rural Solidarity. Hoping to reassert his authority, Walesa joined the strikers, vowing to remain on the site until the issues were settled...
...wildcat strikes continued unabated. In Bialsko Biala, near the Czech border, 60,000 workers in 120 factories, including the assembly line for Polish Fiats, stopped work to demand the firing of the provincial governor and three other officials for corruption and mismanagement. Workers in 70 coal mines and industrial plants in the Bytom region in Upper Silesia struck to protest government failure to honor many of the agreements it made with Solidarity last autumn. In the Lower Silesian city of Jelenia Gora, 250,000 workers staged a general strike on Friday to dramatize then- disaffection with inept local Communist officials...