For Solidarity, ‘This Is Not 1980,’ Non-Striker Says

Several thousand workers from the Lenin Shipyard spent a good part of the day Tuesday milling around a parking lot at the edge of town, waiting to get paid.

They were not strikers, not the hard core of 400 or so determined supporters of the outlawed Solidarity trade union who were then still in the struck shipyard, locked in what seemed a long, slow battle of attrition with a government equally determined to see them fail.

The workers who showed up at the parking lot, to wait for the paymaster’s call, were men who had decided to opt out of this strike, men who for the last nine days had been watching from the sidelines.

Although their feelings as they stood in the wind-raked lot talking among themselves ranged from sympathy to hostility, their numbers were beyond challenge. The workers at the Lenin Shipyard had voted with their feet, and the vote was against the strike.

The strike was still going on. But inside the shipyard, the strikers were slowly coming to their decision to give it up.

Yard Veteran’s Complaint

“Senseless,” was the way one 12-year veteran of the yards described the strike, noting that a new wage schedule, which was to have gone into effect in June, would have improved the pay of all the workers.

“They (the strikers) should agree on a wage settlement and forget the political demands,” said another before the strike ended. “The idea is to make things better for the workers.”

“This is not 1980,” said still another. “The authorities have made everyone afraid. The time is not right. Solidarity cannot win right now.”

Those comments were probably not far off the mark as a reflection of Polish public opinion now, and they help explain why a wave of strikes and protests, which began April 25, failed to ignite the kind of unified nationwide uprising that followed the birth in 1980 of Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Communist Bloc. It was later outlawed under martial law.

The last holdouts in the recent round of strikes were the Lenin Shipyard workers. For the last four days, they had watched as their leaders absorbed themselves in the toils of “negotiations” over pay raises and the workers’ demand for recognition of Solidarity with representatives of the shipyard management and--at some distance--the government. The negotiations could well be described as “pointless” except that they served both sides’ interest in playing for time.

Walesa’s Shifting Metaphors

Solidarity’s national leader, Lech Walesa, who had been in the shipyard for the last six days, used several metaphors to describe the conflict in its shifting contexts, referring to it early on as a “psychological battle,” then as a “gamble” and finally a “poker game.”

Although the odds were against the strikers from the outset, their initial interest in playing for time was the hope that their strike would attract not just the sympathy but the active support of workers around the country--and that it would do so before the government lost patience and sent in the police to end the strike.

The government gambled that support from around the country would not develop, and it won. The authorities used force to end a parallel steel strike in Nowa Huta near Krakow, arresting a score of Solidarity activists and threatening to come down hard on further protests, and it seemed clear within a few days that the Solidarity strikers inside the shipyard were going to be standing alone.

Time was a major element in the standoff, and in the last three or four days the time advantage had seemed to swing to the government.

The number of strikers inside the shipyard had dwindled virtually overnight, from nearly 3,000 before the police raid last Thursday at Nowa Huta to about 1,000. A strong police presence outside the shipyard gates, sealing it off from visiting well-wishers and relatives, brought more attrition.

The first nerve-racking nights inside the yard, when the activity of scurrying police made it seem that an assault was imminent, took a further toll. When the attack did not come, other forces--gloom, boredom, the sense of standing alone with scant outside support--reduced the strikers to the hard core of about 400.

Although phone connections with the yard were cut and police sealed off the yard’s eight gates, food, messages and communiques were passed back and forth, usually borne by teen-agers who found ways around the police and through the shipyard fences. Journalists, following the teen-agers, managed to make daily trips into the yard. Until Tuesday, when the police finally managed to close off even these routes, the strikers seemed buoyed by this tenuous link to the outside.

By Monday night, the strike committee, in consultation with almost a dozen advisers, including Walesa, had begun to list the possible conclusions to the strike. As most of them saw it, there were four.

The first, forcible eviction by the police, was not in the strikers’ power to control, but it was regarded by some of them as the best they could hope for, since it could work to galvanize opinion against the government. But by this time it seemed clear that the government would not intervene in this way.

With Heads Held High

The second, which was ultimately chosen, was one Walesa had begun to discuss with the strikers only that morning. He suggested that they might just walk out through the front gates, with heads held high at having refused to sign any agreement short of their full demands.

A third was to sign an agreement that gave the strikers a place on a commission that would oversee the implementation of strike agreements--wage increases principally, and guarantees of job security for strikers--which could be explained as the government’s first recognition of “an independent social force” since Solidarity. Most workers found the explanation too convoluted to be real, a reaction that probably would have mirrored the public response to it.

The last, the one everybody agreed was unacceptable, was to hold out as long as possible, until, as Walesa himself put it, “there is only Walesa and 50 guys” left inside.