Shipyard Staff Paralyse Gdansk In Fight For Jobs

Desperate workers from the failing Gdansk shipyard halted transport in the Baltic port city for a second day yesterday, giving a possible foretaste of Poland-wide protests planned by the Solidarity union.

The workers, fearing unemployment after the yards receiver last week announced he would dismiss the last 3,800 employees and sell off its assets piecemeal if necessary, obstructed roads and heaped burning tyres on railway and tram lines. As they stepped up a protest launched for one hour on Wednesday, acrid smoke from the fires hung over city spires while traffic was snarled in jams and railway officials said 30 trains had been stopped and would take hours to get moving.

 

About 2,000 shipyard employees blocked the central communications junction of Gdansk and the railroad junction, provincial police commander Stanislaw Bialas said. The city is paralysed and traffic jams stretch for several kilometres, Bialas said, adding police were largely trying to prevent clashes between workers and trapped drivers. We have not received any orders to take action aimed at removing the shipyard workers from the places where they are protesting, Bialas said.

The workers say the government led by ex-communists refuses aid for the yard because Solidarity was born there in 1980 and it remains a symbol to the powerful Solidarity Election Action (AWS) alliance which the union has formed to fight parliamentary elections due later this year.

As pickets wearing safety helmets chanted Commies out, we want jobs, we want bread, the shipyard Solidarity chief Jerzy Borowczak said. The workers are fighting for whats theirs, for their work, their dignity. But the archbishop of Gdansk, Tadeusz Goclowski, in a local radio broadcast asked workers to reflect on whether they should infringe the rights of others with this form of protest. In Warsaw on Wednesday leaders of Solidarity Polands biggest union and nucleus of the strongest opposition grouping announced a national protest against the governments lack of aid for the yard and other industries such as arms.

Details will be ready on Tuesday, but union chiefs said the action was likely to involve demonstrations and strikes. The union has also applied for official permission to raise funds for the yard through sale to the public of contribution coupons, and the interior minister signalled he would agree.

Solidarity hopes that if it can obtain 50 million zlotys ($16.6 million) in this way it can find an investor ready to add 100 million ($33.2 million) more to build ships.

The government has refused to further subsidise the yard which was declared bankrupt last year with debts of 415 million zlotys ($136 million), saying its woes are its own fault. The government has said it expected at least part of the yard would be sold as a going concern to an investor a chance which seems remote since Polish bank Pekao SA refused a $100 million loan for construction of five ships for a German shipowner which would have given a lease of life.

Solidarity says the government helps other firms and has taken its hard-nosed stance over Gdansk for political reasons, while keeping false hopes alive to defuse worker protests.

Finance Minister Marek Belka denied this on Thursday saying the government had in the past guaranteed credits to the yard.

I think the Gdansk yard assets will be sold and the new owner will undertake some shipbuilding and employ part of the people, he told public radio.