Strikes Have Lost Their Clout as Political Weapon in Poland : Labor: Workers who brought down the Communist government now take pay cuts to protect their jobs.

It is the summer season of strikes once again in Poland. On any given day, about 20 labor stoppages are going on, strike alerts are posted in factories, trams are shut down in the cities, buses stop running, garbage collectors stand sullen and idle beside their trucks.

But this strike season has brought a significant change. The general public no longer finds itself alarmed or excited by strikes. And the post-Communist government, still the nation’s largest employer, has countered with its own effective public-relations campaign, pointing out that the “corporation of Poland,” as much as it would like to, simply cannot afford to pay higher wages and bigger benefits to an endless parade of disgruntled workers.

Labor unrest, and its aftermath, was responsible for bringing down governments all through the Communist era and, indeed, led to the Communist collapse here. A series of strikes by Solidarity in 1988 finally drove Poland’s Communist government to the bargaining table in 1989 for negotiations that resulted in a Communist electoral humiliation and the establishment of the first non-Communist government in Eastern Europe.

That government is now led by Lech Walesa, arguably the most famous trade union leader in the world, a man who burst into the world scene, along with the new-born Solidarity movement, in the strike season of August, 1980.

But this strike season will result in no such upheaval in Poland. Declarations such as a recent broadside fired off by the Federation of Metallurgical Trade Unions (representing steel workers, among others)--urging that the government be brought before a “state tribunal” to answer for its economic policies--fall on largely deaf ears.

When the transport workers in the eastern Polish city of Bialystok went on strike recently, the city’s administration fired the drivers and broke up the transit system into three separate units, soon to be privatized and fully reorganized.

A recent strike by bus and tram drivers in Warsaw brought mostly complaints from an inconvenienced public, not the excited anticipation that such an action might have triggered three or four years ago over the possibility that “the government” was under another assault.

As often as not back then, the government was indeed under attack, and Solidarity the union swiftly became Solidarity the broad-based social movement. But its firm base of industrial workers and trade unionism, together with Poland’s history, gave the nation’s blue-collar laborers a social significance that now seems to be a somewhat romanticized artifact of that period.

“We can see the difference in public attitudes,” said Andrzej Szymanski, the Solidarity Union chief at the Huta Warszawa steelworks in Warsaw. “All of our workers can feel the difference.”

Solidarity workers at Huta Warszawa have not gone on strike for two years. Indeed, they voted themselves a 35% pay cut for the last three months in order to save their jobs. The work force has dropped to 5,600, down by almost 3,000 employees since 1989. The mill’s output has fallen to 440,000 tons, less than a third of its 1.7-million-ton output in 1980.

It is a story widely repeated across the country, as old and low-tech industries try, mostly without success, to find new markets in the West. Employees in scores of plants have been sent on unpaid leaves, have skipped paydays or have voted to reduce their wages so that threadbare treasuries of the factories they work for can pay their taxes. The government has been ruthless in shutting down plants that do not pony up their taxes on time.

Szymanski is philosophical about the new state of the workers in the erstwhile “workers’ state,” observing that Solidarity, as a social and political movement, had a long-range goal of overhauling the economy. The classical bread-and-butter issues of the union would be secondary.

“The union had to accept this, realizing it would harm the workers’ immediate interests, because it was necessary for a program of systematic changes, and that the costs would be spread proportionately across the whole of society,” Szymanski said. “In practice, it has been different.”

In practice, he said, “the social costs of the reforms are being borne by the workers.” Special tax breaks, he noted, are being granted to newly established private companies, while the old state-owned enterprises are made to pay penalty taxes for raising salaries--the government’s effective tool for holding down wages in an effort to control inflation.

“The government wants to bankrupt the state factories, with the next step of selling them cheap to private investors,” Szymanski said. “What happens to the workers? They become jobless and the state offers them no protection.”

Although the government uses different language to describe the process, it is hard-pressed to deny the burdens the reforms have placed on the workers, whose interests seemed to galvanize the entire country and its political establishment a few years ago. Public opinion polls show that Poles still support the workers’ right to strike over workplace issues, but the polls have not addressed the issue of support for labor protests against government policies.

In recent months, the government has taken pains to depoliticize labor unrest and has been largely successful. This is a sharp change from even one year ago, when some political figures, including various factions of Solidarity, were offering dire predictions that a summer of strikes could threaten the government, much as it had Communist regimes in the past.

No more. Prime Minister Jan Krzysztof Bielecki, at factory strike sites in Lodz last week, told workers he was running a “corporation called Poland” and criticized the union, the factory management and the workers council for their “passivity.”

“The government has no money to give away,” Bielecki said. “The time has come to build new enterprises. This is the time of competition, a time when we must search for new solutions for the economy. Those who understand this faster than others will stay afloat.”

The government is putting the finishing touches on a law that will provide a “new basis” for labor relations in Poland, one that stresses “normalization,” according to the Ministry of Labor.

“We are moving to a situation where strikes will be settled between unions and factories--not with the government,” said Elzbieta Sobotka, deputy labor minister. “It will be a situation in which unions are recognized as labor organizations, not as political organizations.

“Four or five years ago, strikes had a strictly determined enemy--the old system, “ she added. “Strikes had a romantic content and goal. Today we see them much more as a conflict of interests, and our new law provides a way of settling them.”

Strikes will be fully legal under the new law, but the law also provides for a series of preliminary steps, including mediation.

Attitudes on both sides of labor disputes, she noted, still linger and are slow to change. Management is slow to find creative solutions to stay in business, and unions see the state as a negotiating opponent that can always surrender more than it does.

“A lot of people in big industrial centers,” Sobotka said, “feel that the factory is the state, or at least that the state stands behind the factory. And they feel that if the factory is in trouble it is the state’s responsibility. We want to change all that.”