Analysis : In Long Run, Solidarity Strikers May Have Won More Than Regime Did

When the last holdouts of the strike in the Lenin Shipyard called it quits Tuesday night, their slow march past the shipyard gates and through the streets of Gdansk seemed a spectacle torn from the pages of Poland’s often gloomy history.

The tears in the eyes of many of the approximately 400 strikers who had stayed to the end, and the sobs from many of their well-wishers who joined them in a nearby church, seemed to admit defeat in yet another lost Polish cause.

The strikers had begun their protest, midway through a national wave of labor unrest, demanding higher wages and the reinstatement of the banned trade union Solidarity. In the end, they achieved neither.

But, paradoxically, Solidarity may have won more in the long run than the government that successfully faced it down.

However, Polish authorities did manage to halt--at least temporarily--what one week ago looked like the beginning of a full-blown crisis of the sort that has sent three postwar Polish governments tumbling down.

It did so at enormous cost, virtually wrecking the so-called “second stage” of Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski’s economic reform plan, by granting large wage increases in its successful bid to buy labor peace in three other major strikes and stop the walkouts from spreading.

The major goal of the reform’s second stage was to raise prices in an effort to inject some market-force realism into the sagging socialist economy--and its success depended on being able to hold the line on wages. Because it was unable to do that, a further escalation of inflation, already running at about 45%, seems inevitable.

With a foreign debt of about $37 billion, Poland will find it even harder to convince Western lending agencies that it is a good risk for badly needed hard currency.

In an effort to salvage what it can of the reform, the Polish Parliament on Wednesday enacted a law to grant special powers to the reform’s chief architect, including the authority to freeze wages and prices, hire and fire managers and veto investment plans of state-owned enterprises. An earlier version of the law, which would have banned all strikes and protests until the end of the year, was deleted from the bill.

Solidarity Advance

For Solidarity, despite its immediate loss in the shipyard where it was born in 1980, the strike may well have brought rejuvenation after six years in a kind of wilderness. The shipyard strike was the first protest mounted in its name since martial law was declared and the union was outlawed in 1982.

Perhaps significantly, the strike was not generated by the Solidarity leadership, which had been caught by surprise. Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, interviewed when the first of the strikes began about two weeks ago, declared at the time, “I am not for these strikes.”

Walesa and other leaders believed--correctly, as it turned out--that it was “too early” for strikes to generate enough momentum to win the backing of the whole population.

Once they began, however, Walesa and the other leaders had no choice but to support them. And when the young workers in the shipyard responded to Walesa’s May Day call for “action”--which Walesa said was not a call for strikes--by organizing a walkout, there was little Walesa could do but go along.

Commitment of Youth

What seemed to surprise Solidarity’s old guard most, however, was the degree of commitment it found among the shipyard’s younger workers, many of whom were children or teen-agers when the union was founded. Unscarred by the memory of its defeat then, the youthful strikers bounded into their protest full of optimism--and no little naivete. From the beginning, Walesa, who moved into the shipyard with them, told them it would not be easy.

Solidarity’s old-line activists and supporters now say they believe these younger strikers--along with scores of student volunteers who supported them--will be the cadres for Solidarity’s next fight. And they are certain it is a fight that will one day come.

“If necessary,” Walesa vowed Wednesday, “we will try again. Nothing ended. Nothing is finished.”

From the government side, spokesman Jerzy Urban said the “May events compel the government to more consistently develop political and economic reform, which should be more strongly felt by the whole society.”

In its aftermath, perhaps the most notable quality of the strike was the caution exercised by both sides, probably because each had a full appreciation of its own weaknesses.

Slim Chance

Solidarity realized throughout that the chances of bringing the whole nation on board behind its strike were slim. The government also realized its scant public support and its fragile economic condition would not be improved by the dramatically provocative action of sending in police to roust the workers from the shipyard.

Both sides, using the Roman Catholic Church as an intermediary, played for time, and both sides won something for the effort: Solidarity won the chance to fight again, with fresh blood. And the government won the chance to go on with yet another stage of its reform plan, perhaps realizing that it may not have many chances left.