A Meeting with Old Mates

Although he has been boss of Poland's Communist Party for little more than a month, Edward Gierek is about to receive a decisive report card. When the party's 91-man Central Committee assembles, perhaps as early as this week, Gierek must persuade its members to support his plans for economic and political reforms. Since most members owe their jobs to Gierek's predecessor, the ousted Wladyslaw Gomulka, this may prove to be quite a challenge.

Gierek last week weathered a different but no less important test with high marks. With unrest continuing among the workers whose December rioting led to the leadership shakeup, Gierek took the unusual and daring step of meeting personally with the most militant protesters in Szczecin and Gdansk.

The biggest confrontation occurred in Szczecin, where workers in the giant Warski shipyards verged on rebellion. Angered by what they considered the new government's slow pace in answering their grievances, they staged slowdowns and drafted a list of 2,000 demands. Among them: pay increases, release of rioters still held in jail, and the removal of some Politburo members.

In Szczecin Gierek met the workers' committee in an extraordinary session that lasted from early evening until 2 a.m. the next day. Carefully Gierek called the rebels "rodacy" (countrymen) or "stare pierony" (old mates), rather than "towarzysze" (comrades), a word that Gomulka used in addressing nonparty members as well as Communists--an offense to many of the former.

Gierek promised that the workers would be paid for their strike days "if you fulfill your quota." His most popular promise was to draw a clearer line between party and state functions, thus enabling more nonparty members to hold high government and industrial posts. In a major concession, the government announced that a new incentive system that had helped spark the riots will be postponed and possibly revised.

High Toll. At week's end both Szczecin and Gdansk appeared quiet. But the bitterness goes very deep, for reasons that are becoming increasingly clear. Eyewitness accounts by Polish visitors in Europe and elsewhere, unverified but similar, indicate that December's death toll, officially placed at under 100, might have been as high as 1,000.

By two separate accounts, the worst killing occurred in Gdynia. Workers on their way to the shipyard were stopped by militiamen and ordered to return home. When they refused, the soldiers opened fire, killing several of the crowd. Infuriated workers draped the body of a slain youth in a Polish flag and carried it toward City Hall. There militiamen fired again. Official reports said 21 were killed, but eyewitnesses said: "They have made a mistake; they have left off the nought at the end of the figure."

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