Polish Workers Strike to Protest Food Price Hikes of 500%

Polish workers went on strike to protest against food price rises of up to 500%, but major plants such as the Baltic shipyards and coal mines of the south appear unaffected so far, authorities said Saturday.

They said the most serious stoppages occurred Friday in the railway and communications industries. In the western region of Legnica, where thousands of Soviet troops are based, strikers cut off the city from the national telephone and telex network.

Railroad workers stopped commuter trains for four hours in the Baltic port of Gdansk, and bus drivers staged a sit-in strike in the western town of Zielona Gora. Railroad workers in the southwestern region of Silesia also stopped work for an hour.

The workers were protesting against the Communist authorities’ removal last Tuesday of most state subsidies on food prices. In some areas, prices for ham--a Polish staple--rocketed by about 500% to 7,700 zloties ($9) a kilogram (2.2 pounds).

However, the industrial unrest apparently did not spread to the factories, mills and mines whose output is the lifeblood of Poland’s economy and whose workers toppled governments in 1970 and 1980 by striking against food price rises.

Steelworkers called off a strike alert at the Nowa Huta mill in Krakow on Thursday after winning pay rises. In Gdansk, some shipyard workers want a strike alert to be declared Monday, but unionists have taken no official decision.

Solidarity’s national leadership denounced the removal of food price subsidies as an ill-prepared plan. “Such a situation threatens to create an explosion of justified public discontent,” the leadership said.

They said workers should receive 100% compensation for food price increases and more than the 80% compensation for inflation in general that was previously agreed on with the authorities.