Workers, Police Clash as Poland Marks May Day

Police and pro-Solidarity demonstrators clashed in Warsaw and Gdansk on Sunday, and anti-government demonstrations were mounted in five other Polish cities, marking a tense May Day with workers at the nation’s largest steel mill remaining on strike for the sixth day.

In the Baltic seaport of Gdansk, the birthplace of the now-outlawed Solidarity trade union, demonstrators engaged in running skirmishes with police for 40 minutes. Witnesses said two police officers were beaten when they tried to enter a churchyard to apprehend rock-throwing demonstrators.

Demonstrators Disperse

In Warsaw, police clashed briefly with demonstrators after a rally outside St. Stanislaw Kostka Church, a center of Solidarity support in the capital. The demonstrators dispersed after a one-hour standoff with police, who were determined to prevent the rally from spreading beyond the neighborhood of the church.

A government spokesman said that at least 33 people were arrested across the country in what Solidarity had called a national “day of protest.”

Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski, speaking at official May Day ceremonies, took a hard line against the wave of labor unrest that has beset Poland in the last week.

“Our country is at a turning point” in its economic reform plan, Jaruzelski said in a rally preceding the traditional May Day parade, suggesting that workers’ demands for higher wages could derail the government’s faltering effort to revive the troubled economy.

“To give more, one has to take away from somebody else, or produce more,” Jaruzelski said. “One cannot solve every complex problem very quickly.”

As Jaruzelski spoke, hundreds of striking workers at the vast Lenin steelworks in Nowa Huta were attending a special Mass. The service was conducted by two priests who had been spirited into the sealed-off plant by the workers, who struck last Tuesday, demanding a 50% pay increase to offset price increases imposed by the government in February and March.

The factory’s strike committee and management negotiators have been stalemated since the strike began, and government officials are clearly worried that strikes could spread to other industrial concerns.

Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader, urged the rally in Gdansk to show support for the striking workers at Nowa Huta but stopped short of calling for more strikes.

“I demand from you solidarity with Nowa Huta tomorrow (Monday) in your shipyards, in your ports and in your factories. I want it to be effective. Show me tomorrow what you can do,” Walesa urged.

The wave of strikes in Poland, the worst since Solidarity was suspended and martial law was declared in 1981, began last Monday with a transport workers strike in two western Polish cities, Bydgoscsz and Inowroclaw. Workers there demanded--and within hours received--a 60% pay increase.

The strike at Nowa Huta, which employs 32,000 workers, began the next day.

On Friday, a defense plant at Stalowa Wola, in southwestern Poland, went on strike. Workers decided to go back to work the following day, apparently after receiving a wage increase of about 50%.

Over the weekend, reports were circulating--mostly unconfirmed--that other major industrial concerns would issue strike alerts today and that other workers across the country would begin to demand equally substantial pay increases.

1981 Crisis Recalled

The government could give in to the pay demands, but officials fear that issuing wholesale pay raises could lead to the kind of economic chaos that hit the country in 1981, when shops’ stocks of merchandise were bought out and even basic food commodities were in short supply.

Giving in to “unjustified” wage demands, Jaruzelski said Sunday, “would lead directly to the infamous epoch of (having only) vinegar on store shelves. We have gone through that already.”

Some Solidarity activists have been saying in recent days that the new wave of strikes could bring down the Jaruzelski government, as it has brought down Polish governments in the past.

One activist, Solidarity theoretician Adam Michnik, said the strikes represent “the beginning of a big movement for social change and the beginning of the end for the Jaruzelski government.”

The government, he said in an interview, could settle the strikes temporarily by increasing wages, but “in one month, in two months, they will begin again.”

“Authorities here think they can fix things with two solutions--printing money and sending out the army. Neither of them works,” he noted.