Poland’s Official Unions Join in Price-Hike Protest : Move By Government Organizations Seen as Effort to Undermine Solidarity’s Appeal for 15-Minute Strike

Poland’s official trade unions on Saturday categorically rejected the government’s proposed consumer price increases, saying the rises would serve only to lower the country’s standard of living.

The new trade union movement, which the government hopes will take the place of the outlawed Solidarity union, objected in principle to price increases as the main instrument of Poland’s economic reform. It called instead for better management of the centrally directed economy.

Lech Walesa has joined other leaders of Solidarity in calling for a 15-minute work stoppage across the nation next Thursday to protest the proposed increases. Officials of the new unions, while openly contemptuous of Solidarity, expressed similarly dim views of the price increases at a meeting Saturday in Warsaw, reported on nationwide television.

“The announced concentration of price hikes will lead to a decrease in the standard of living for working people that we cannot approve,” said Romuald Sosnowski, vice chairman of the official unions’ newly formed National Coordinating Committee.

Portions of the official unions’ statement were broadcast on the state television network’s main evening news and carried by the government news agency, PAP.

Increases May Be Dropped

Solidarity sources said that the prominent treatment given to the official union’s criticism made it seem likely that the government’s own sampling of public opinion, and the prospect of work stoppages, may lead officials to postpone or revise the planned price increases. The government-sanctioned unions apparently hope to reap credit for any retreat by the government and gain credibility in the public eye, these sources said.

A government communique in January outlined three sets of increases and called for a month of “social consultations” in workplaces and in the news media to choose the one least objectionable to the public. They ranged from sharp hikes combined with a lifting of rationing on most food items except meat to smaller increases and continued rationing.

Overall, the government foresees a 12% to 13% rise in retail prices but a jump of 20% to 30% this spring in the cost of natural gas, electricity and heating coal. Rent, postal rates and transportation costs will also rise.

Since the 1950s, price increases to shore up a stumbling socialist economy have been the usual cause for civil unrest in Poland. Last year, however, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski’s government managed to introduce increases averaging 10% without major difficulty after an unprecedented period of public debate.

Solidarity--speaking through its many underground publications and at least one clandestine radio broadcast--has for weeks denounced the proposed increases this year as potentially ruinous for the average worker, despite promised wage increases.

‘A Real Killer’

“The new price increases will, for many social groups, be a real killer,” Zbigniew Bujak, the leading figure of the Solidarity underground, said in the latest issue of a clandestine weekly, Tygodnik Mazowsze.

Many families are already spending 70% of their income on food and could not bear a further 13% increase, Bujak said. While the average Polish worker brings home only 17,000 zlotys ($125) a month, Solidarity estimates that the average family of four would find its monthly expenses up by 4,000 zlotys and wages by only a few hundred zlotys.

In its statement on Saturday, the government-sanctioned trade union federation said it approved of none of the variants put forward by the authorities. It said “they are not likely to halt inflation or to exert a lasting influence on rationalization of the economy.”

The new unions, established after martial law was imposed in December,1981, claim a membership of 5 million--half that of Solidarity during the height of its power. Martial law was lifted 19 months later.