Word: labors
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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...purge of both Politburo and lower-level cadres testifies to the clout of Solidarity. From a ragtag bunch of shipyard workers and dissidents, it has grown into a labor leviathan, with an estimated 10 million members (out of 17.3 million employed) in 54 chapters around the country. When a strike loomed in Warsaw, no less than Deputy Prime Minister Jagielski offered to dispatch a government helicopter to Gdansk to pick up Lech Walesa. Solidarity has even acquired a modicum of official respectability. To raise funds, it has sponsored a benefit performance at the National Opera House and auctions...
Solidarity is not a monolith, nor is it a creature of Walesa, though he is certainly its symbol and central force. Solidarity's 18-member leadership sprang directly from last summer's 21-day strike, and thus has a distinct Baltic coast flavor. Many are experienced labor activists who have been in trouble with the authorities before. One presidium member, Anna Walentynowicz, 51, was fired from her job as a crane operator a week before the Lenin Shipyard flare-up last August. "The immediate cause of the strike was to have me rehired," she says with a trace...
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...
Walesa became a strike leader at the Lenin Shipyard during the 1970 food price riots. Fired for his attempts at labor organizing in 1976, he found work in a machine repair shop and helped found the underground Baltic Free Trade Unions Movement. He was sent as a delegate to the official union elections in 1979, but was outraged to find the local party secretary controlling the vote. "Why have I come here, to elect or to applaud?" he demanded. The answer: an unceremonious sacking...
...contrast, the board's Democrats questioned whether the plan would lower inflationary expectations. They pointed out that one of the main causes of higher prices is the anticipation of more inflation, which leads both labor and companies to keep pushing up wages and prices. As they see it, there is almost no chance of a major reduction in prices during the first half of next year, and large tax cuts now might encourage everyone to start asking for more in expectation of still higher inflation. Said Economist Eckstein: "The scientific evidence suggests that the only thing that improves inflation...