Polish Workers Abandon Strike : Effort to Restore Solidarity, Rally : National Support Ends at Shipyard

Polish shipyard workers ended their strike Tuesday, abandoning a nine-day protest demanding reinstatement of their banned Solidarity trade union and surrendering the hope that their action would ignite the sort of national upheaval that rocked Poland eight years ago.

Marching slowly behind a wooden cross and a grimy banner of the outlawed union, the last 400 to 500 holdouts of the strike walked though the gates of the Lenin Shipyard at sunset, red-eyed and weary but assured by their leaders that their defeat, by a steadily resistant Polish government, was only temporary.

“This time we did not manage to win,” a statement from the strikers said. “We are not leaving the shipyard in triumph. (But) we are leaving it with our heads held high and convinced of the need and rightness of our protest.”

Walesa at Head of Column

Lech Walesa, the national Solidarity leader who had spent the past six days inside the shipyard with the strikers, walked at the head of their column, his arms linked with the generally youthful members of the shipyard strike committee, who had hoped that a wave of labor unrest that began in Poland 15 days ago would continue to build and rally national support behind their cause.

Instead of a leading a widespread outbreak of sympathetic protests, the strikers watched as the government quashed the rash of strikes and threatened stern action against potential labor unrest. After a few days, the strikers found that even fellow shipyard workers refused to join them in significant numbers, some of them fearing an assault by police and others doubting that the protest would have any chance of success.

“We had to assess the situation,” strike committee leader Aloyzi Szablewski said. “We had the shipyard, but we had no support outside.” The strikers, he said, listened to discussions of the situation confronting them.

“They took it in peace,” he said, “but I saw tears in some eyes that we had ended it this way, but they accepted it.”

The ordeal was evident in the strained faces of the strikers, even as church bells rang in their honor from the spire of St. Brigida’s Church, which had encouraged their effort by supplying food and communications with outside supporters.

Crowd Greets Strikers

A crowd of about 1,000 that rushed forward to greet the strikers when they crossed the lines of police ringing the shipyard gates seemed struck by the solemnity of their expressions, and the almost funereal pace of the procession to a Mass at St. Brigida’s.

“The world is watching and admiring you,” a priest there told them. “Perhaps your defeat means your fight has just begun. Be proud of your struggle and do not cease fighting for the rights of the Polish worker.”

Walesa, who had advised the strikers but declined to acknowledge a role in its leadership, seemed more serene than some of the young workers, many of whom had tears in their eyes through much of the Mass.

Walesa had initially called for the action that resulted in the strike, in a May Day speech that urged Poles to support a steelworkers’ strike in the nation’s largest mill at Nowa Huta in southern Poland. Although Walesa said at the time that he was not calling for strike action, the shipyard strike broke out the next day.

Walesa, although supporting the strike, referred frequently to what he said was its “premature” start. But he also indicated that once it had begun, and the young activists had begun to press for the legalization of Solidarity in the shipyard where the union was founded, he had little choice but to join it.

Convergence of Forces

The shipyard strike enmeshed once again Polish opposition forces, the government and the Roman Catholic Church, which claims as adherents 95% of Poland’s population.

The government, embarked on a foundering reform program designed to rescue Poland’s crisis-ridden economy, had been caving in quickly to wage demands from workers around the country when the strikes erupted, first among bus drivers in the western Polish city of Bydgoszcz. A strike at a defense plant at Stalowa Wola soon followed, and it was quickly settled with another grant of higher wages.

The Nowa Huta strike two days later was the first that included political as well as wage demands, and the Lenin Shipyard strike followed.

The government used force to end the Nowa Huta strike, sending in police in a pre-dawn raid to rout the strikers. In Gdansk, with the symbolic power of the shipyard on the strikers’s side, the government hesitated and decided to wait it out.

The Catholic Church served as a mediator that both sides used to play for time, stringing out the drama but, as Walesa said, “allowing the government time to think things through.”

Gain for Government

In the end, the government may have gained some strength by avoiding a forcible end to the shipyard strike. But it also has seen its economic reform plan damaged by its rapid accession to wage demands, agreed to in the interest of salvaging the reform.

Solidarity, despite the seeming defeat in the shipyard strike, has received a needed shot in the arm by putting its name once again at the forefront of calls for economic and political change in Poland.

“The country is deep in crisis,” the Solidarity statement said Tuesday as the strike ended. “The economy is dying. The mass of Poles do not see prospects for life in their own country. The state is still treated by those who govern it as their own property.”

Solidarity can also say that the shipyard strike involved a younger generation of workers, most of whom were teen-agers or children at the time of the union’s birth. Walesa, who emerged from the strike as the union’s most persuasive voice among the new youth of Solidarity, seemed to cement his place at the forefront of Poland’s opposition forces.