Solidarity Calls Off Strike After Regime Retreats

Solidarity leader Lech Walesa on Tuesday called off a threatened nationwide strike, claiming victory over the Polish government and its plan to raise consumer prices.

Walesa and Zbigniew Bujak, a leader of the Solidarity underground who has been in hiding since martial law was imposed in 1981, issued a joint statement canceling plans for a 15-minute work stoppage on Thursday to protest the proposed price increases.

But the statement called on Poles to use other means of protest to pressure the government to adopt economic reforms. And it said the strike weapon must held in reserve for use if necessary.

‘Achieved Their Objective’

“Efficient preparations for a nationwide action have . . . achieved their objective,” the two leaders of the banned union said. “They forced the government to make a tactical concession.”

The decision to cancel the token strike came one day after the government--saying it was responding to complaints by its new official trade unions--scrapped its plans to raise the prices of food and other necessities by an average of 12% to 13%.

It promised to unveil a new plan in the next few days that will still mean the introduction of higher prices--but over a longer period of time and with higher wage and pension compensations to cushion the blow.

Both sides thus climbed down from a confrontation that neither was likely to win decisively.

Food Prices Were Spark

For the government, sharply increased prices risked reviving active resistance from a sullen population skeptical of the need for the increases and already strapped by inflation. Food price boosts were the spark that ignited bloody worker protests in the past.

For Walesa and the outlawed union, the call for a general strike, however brief, meant gambling on a popular mood that is hard to gauge. A strike call risked the embarrassment of a poor showing from workers who may in fact see little to gain and much to lose from fresh confrontation with the Communist authorities.

Solidarity’s last call for a general strike, in November, 1982, brought only a tepid response from a nation still stunned by martial law. By early last year, an opinion poll conducted by an underground publication in Warsaw, Slowo Podziemne, found only 21% of respondents in favor of strike action.

Public Mood Darkens

Since then, however, the public mood has darkened during a long, unusually cold winter made still more bitter by the murder of Solidarity’s most eloquent champion in the Roman Catholic clergy, Father Jerzy Popieluszko. What little credibility the government may have gained by the conviction of four secret police officers in the murder, it appears to have squandered in a harsh new propaganda campaign against the church that Poland’s bishops have called “unparalleled” in recent times.