Poland: A Three-Class Society

The government pretends to pay, the workers pretend to work He is a typical Polish worker. Call him

Jan. He lives with his wife Ewa and

two children in a gray high-rise apartment complex at Ursynow, a suburb south of Warsaw. The flat has three rooms and a bath, which is often out of order because of faulty workmanship. Jan and his wife had to wait ten years to get the apartment. Most days Ewa rises first, before dawn, in order to catch a bus into downtown Warsaw and be in line at the meat market when it opens at 6 a.m. The early trip to town is annoyingly inconvenient but necessary: typically, their housing complex contains few shops and other services for its residents. When she gets to the market, she will usually have to wait for two hours before being served, and then will find little to choose from.

Jan is due at his job as a clerk in a government import-export company in Warsaw at 8 a.m.; his status as a white-collar worker means little, in fact, because the same frustrations are shared by all. The morning bus ride takes only 40 minutes, but the congestion at rush hour is suffocating. Thus he often rides with

his brother, who finally got his new Polski-Fiat 126 after a four-year wait and at a cost of 170,000 zloty ($5,700)--roughly three

times the average yearly salary. But a car

too has its drawbacks. Gasoline is more

than $3 per gal., and if something goes

wrong on the car replacement parts are

apt to be unavailable.

Even before the strikers downed their tools in protest against prices and shortages, life was not easy for most Poles. In the cities, such commonplace items as fish, cheese, eggs, butter, fruit, vegetables and toilet paper are often hard to find.

"When something is available," says Jadwiga Kowalska, 46, a high school teacher from Poznan, "you rush to buy as much as you can because who knows when you can get it again."

Shortages may be the most obvious problem, but Poland's economic malaise cuts much more deeply. When the trains do not run, or the electricity goes off, or a project remains unfinished, the response by workers is a shrug of the shoulders and the disclaimer, "To nie jest moja wina" (It isn't my fault).

Instead, chronic complainers all, they blame Edward Gierek and the Soviets and tell bitter jokes to relieve the frustration. Like the one about the old woman who hobbles into a butcher shop and asks first for pork roast, then for lamb, then for veal. On being told that there is none, she storms out. "What a nuisance," gripes the first butcher. "Maybe," replies the second, "but what a memory she has."

The irony is that in the midst of shortages, almost everything is available--at the right price. Most Poles resort to an extensive black-market system where meat, food, clothes, jewelry, cars and appliances can all be had, provided the medium of exchange is not the zloty but the dollar, the deutsche mark or outright barter. Waiting time to buy a Polish-built Fiat can be shortened from four years to a few weeks if payment is made in dollars rather than zloty. The plumber, whose services are normally difficult to obtain, comes immediately if the bill is paid with a pair of nylon hosiery. Hard-to-get meats like veal are available, at six times the official price; wealthy nightclub patrons in Warsaw are occasionally pounced on by flashers who pull open their coats to offer for sale not their bodies but hunks of fresh meat.

The extensive black-market economy is condoned by the government. Desperate for Western currency, it allows citizens to maintain foreign currency bank accounts. More than 5 million Poles have such accounts, with estimated deposits of $400 million. The cash may be earned legally in various ways, sent in by relatives in the West or obtained on the black market. It can be deposited at 4% interest or spent in special hard-currency shops on imports and otherwise unobtainable Polish goods like high-quality vodka and clothing. Those who have no dollars can only go to so-called komercyjne, or commercial shops, where some items are available at premium prices, or to state stores, where prices are stabilized but long lines and bare shelves are the rule. Gripes one taxi driver: "We now have three classes in this classless society.

Those who have dollars, those who have zloty, and those who have neither dollars nor zloty."

To earn the extra cash and hard currency needed to live better, moonlighting is common.

While most of the country's privately owned, small-scale businesses are efficiently run, slacking on the state job has become almost a national pastime.

Grumbling over high prices, shortages, low pay and the lack of incentives, workers like Jan take long coffee breaks and live by the rule: "Whether you stand up or lie down, you get paid just the same." Or, as one worker puts it, "The government pretends to pay us a wage, and we pretend to work."

"After this year's flooding and low crop yields, many Poles have a premonition that things can only get worse," says Irena Lasota-Zabludowska, 35, an emigre from Warsaw, now studying at Columbia University in New York City "People are beginning to say, 'This winter we're going to starve.' " In a society where the trade-off for the lack of individual freedom was to have been a steadily improving standard of living, the potential for a political explosion is always present. Explains Teacher Kowalska "The mood in the country is worse than it was ten years ago, when Gierek came to power. There are greater shortages and higher prices. The system seems to hav collapsed. We have made the sacrifice! But for what?" I

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.