Polish Talks Fail; Shipyard Strikers Decide to Continue Holdout

Striking shipyard workers decided on Monday to continue their holdout against Polish authorities after an all-night round of talks between strike leaders and the yard management broke down without an agreement.

The management refused to accept a proposal put forward by strike leaders to appoint a commission that would include Solidarity union members to oversee the implementation of any strike agreement.

The commission idea was a compromise proposal that seemed to win only scant backing of the 400 to 500 striking Solidarity activists. The strikers, at a meeting inside the locked shipyard, unhesitatingly shouted their determination to stay until they win recognition for the outlawed Solidarity union or the Polish government decides to remove them by force.

Although the government used the police to end a strike last week at a steel mill in southern Poland, it has held off sending in policemen to end the weeklong strike here.

“Our spirits are up,” said Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader who has remained inside the vast Lenin Shipyard, alternately advising and cheering on the strikers since Wednesday. “Those who wanted to leave are gone. Only the tough ones remain.”

Over the last several days, the number of strikers inside the plant has been falling. When it began, an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 workers, out of a force of about 11,000, were active participants in the strike.

After a pre-dawn police raid Thursday at the Lenin Steelworks in Nova Huta near Krakow, the number of strikers dropped sharply. A rough count taken by reporters Monday indicated that about 500 workers were still inside.

The spirit of the strikers has been strained by what many of them see as a lack of response by the Polish public to their protest.

Many of them expected their action would spark similar strikes nationwide. But a combination of the government’s hard-line approach to the protests and the general fatigue of the Polish public prevented the outburst the strikers had counted on.

The strikers were heartened at least briefly Monday by a report that workers at the Ursus tractor factory in Warsaw, in the past a staunchly militant work force, had gone out on strike.

But according to a government news agency report, only 70 employees had stopped working. This report denied that the action constituted a strike. Opposition sources and some workers said that about 1,000 workers were involved.