Furor over a Five-Day Week

By Sara C. Medina

Solidarity defies the regime on the "Saturday issue "

In an effort to avert a collision with the government and stave off a possible Soviet military invasion, Lech Walesa, the leader of Poland's independent Solidarity unions, had called for a moratorium on strikes until mid-January. But last week, after scarcely more than a month of relative peace, the labor front heated up again. Renewed protests and strike threats showed that the union leadership is still unable to impose a uniform discipline on the vast and restive labor movement.

In the most ominous dispute, Solidarity's national commission passed a defiant resolution calling for a five-day week by declaring Saturday a nonworking day. Since most Poles are usually required to work a six-day week, this was a provocative departure. Several union locals, representing shipyard workers in Gdansk and Gdynia, coal miners in Silesia, and most of the 16,000 workers at the giant Ursus tractor factory outside Warsaw, threatened to force the demand by not showing up for work on Saturday. The Ministry of Labor, Wages and Social Affairs responded by instructing factory managers to dock the pay of workers who did not report on Saturday. In turn, Solidarity warned that "sanctions" against workers, specifically firings for Saturday absenteeism, could lead to strikes.

Positions seemed to be hardening on both sides. "Under the circumstances," said a Solidarity spokesman, "the government is no longer our partner, but our opponent." For its part, in a televised commentary, the government raised the level of its own confrontational rhetoric by denouncing wildcat labor actions as "displays of noisy anarchy."

The "Saturday crisis" grew out of the Gdansk and Jastrzebie agreements that ended last summer's widespread strikes, in which the government agreed to end all Saturday work. At the end of last month, however, the government cited the country's deepening economic crisis and announced that for the time being it could not give all workers all Saturdays off. Instead, the government said that it hoped to increase gradually the present number of free Saturdays (there were 14 in 1980) until 1985, when the five-day week would become generalized. As a start, the government would nearly double the number of free Saturdays this year. But that was not enough for union militants intent on holding the government to the letter of its summer agreements.

Walesa made one of his periodic trips to Warsaw to meet with Deputy Premier Mieczyslaw Jagielski to discuss not only the issue of the five-day week but also censorship disputes, including the right of Solidarity to publish its own newspaper and of theaters to screen a documentary about the summer strikes. The fact that Jagielski, the regime's top-ranking Deputy Premier, who had personally negotiated the Gdansk accord, had been suddenly called in to replace a lower-ranking official for the talks showed the serious ness of the new labor-government face-off. Walesa and Jagielski were closeted in the low. gray stone building of the Council of Ministers for six hours.

When Walesa returned to Gdansk to report to Solidarity's national commission during its two-day meeting, his account of the Warsaw talks was cautiously pessimistic. "They are trying to dismantle us quietly," he said. "We must realize that Solidarity is a thorn in the government's side." The Solidarity delegates, in accordance with the summer agreements, proclaimed their call for a five-day work week and warned against any attempt to compensate by wage reductions or loss of other holidays. The resolution did leave the government an out, however, by declaring that the union leadership would listen to "properly explained" government counterproposals for some limitation on the number of free Saturdays.

In a national television appearance, Jagielski offered a compromise: the government would grant workers every other Saturday off, or give them all Saturdays free but add half an hour to each working day, in effect, a five-day week of 8 1/2-hour work days. Otherwise, Jagielski pleaded, the loss of Saturday work would cause another 9% drop in production, on top of 1980's economic woes. Thus, he said, he was appealing to "the patriotism of the people" to help out in this difficult time. Despite his entreaties, a large percentage of Poland's industrial work force did stay home last Saturday.

In other wildcat labor disputes, workers from 17 factories in and around Ustrzyki Dolne in southeast Poland staged a one-hour warning strike. The walkouts were in support of a sit-in at local government offices to protest police harassment of organizers for Solidarity and its peasant counterpart, Rural Solidarity. Meanwhile, in Jelenia Gora, in the southwest, workers announced a "strike alert" for next week unless a government team was dispatched to discuss their grievances, including a demand for the dismissal of a minister in charge of relations with the unions.

What was most worrisome to both national labor organizers and government officials was the continued presence of the 55 Soviet divisions that remain poised within striking distance of Poland. The Soviets, obviously, were still watching. Poland, said the Soviet journal Kommunist last week, was beset "by chaos in the national economy, by the irresponsible use of strikes and by cases of open anti-socialist activity by counterrevolutionary groups." Such statements clearly suggested that the threat of Soviet intervention was still very real, and that renewed labor disputes and strikes, demonstrating the continued inability of the government and the unions to find a basis for cooperation, may yet give the Soviets the excuse they need to intervene. --By Sara C Medina.

Reported by Barry Kalb/West Berlin

With reporting by Barry Kalb

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