Word: shipyard
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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...
...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 of wonder. "Nobody thought it would have the effect it had." Wojciech Gruszecki, 44, who has been advising Poland's private farmers, has a doctorate in chemical engineering. Says...
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...
...Walesa's fortunes changed astonishingly when he scaled the gate of Lenin Shipyard last Aug. 14 to seize the helm of an angry strike movement. He became the workers' natural choice to head the independent union that emerged from that historic confrontation. Looking back over his long struggles, he remarks: "They have been tough years, tough on my wife and children. But I couldn't give...
...unionizing mission has brought a few temporal rewards. He now draws a union salary of $333 a month -roughly equal to a shipyard worker's. He was able to trade his former two-room flat for a new six-room apartment in a suburban row of bristling concrete towers; his wardrobe has grown from one to five suits; friends keep him supplied with a seemingly endless stream of domestic and imported cigarettes. "You're going to get the way all the big bureaucrats get-mark my word," scolded a woman delegate at a recent union meeting. Walesa smiled...