Word: electrician
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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Walesa (pronounced Va.h-wen-sah) was an unemployed electrician. Today, as leader of the Communist world's only independent labor union, he is one of the most powerful men in Poland, a folk hero not only to millions of his countrymen but to much of the world. His achievement all but defies description; in effect, he single-handed rallied his fellow workers to stand up against the will and the might of the Soviet Union. Walesa looks ill-suited for such eminence...
...court appearance was the high point of a triumphant tour of Warsaw by the Gdansk electrician who became a national folk hero as the leader of the legendary Lenin Shipyard strike. Walesa began the morning with a 9 o'clock Mass at the Church of the Holy Cross, where three days earlier, regular radio broadcasts of the Roman Catholic Mass had resumed following a 41-year blackout. Later in the day, Walesa's delegation met with a group of Politburo members, including Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Jagielski, the official who had negotiated the Gdansk agreement on behalf...
...hero. At 5 ft. 7 in., with a slight build, a mop of brown hair overhanging his bulbous nose, and a bushy mustache, he wears outsize clothes that look like hand-me-downs from much larger brothers. Nor is he accustomed to prominence. Walesa was working as an electrician in the Lenin Shipyard in 1970, when bloody riots broke out over food prices and prompted him to join the yard's strike committee. Just before the recurrence of rioting in 1976, he was fired for criticizing national economic policies. In 1979 he joined a group of activist workers...
...Says Lucas Perez, 32, a welder who came to the U.S. a month ago: "I've gone through two pairs of shoes looking for work. There is none." Adds Hilda Lisa, 29, watching over two children in the tent city, while her husband looks for work as an electrician: "We had been dreaming of getting out of Cuba for years. And now we are here-no jobs, no housing, nothing...
...worker's monthly pay to $385, more than twice the national average of $172 for other industries, in fact. But the decision was overturned by the rank-and-file, who refused to "betray the other strikers." In an abrupt about-face, Strike Leader Lech Walesa, a 37-year-old electrician, told shipyard workers: "We must fight alongside them until...