Pressing On

Solidarity scores another first

"No papers on sale today because of strike," the posters on Poland's newsstands announced last week. For two days printers belonging to Solidarity, the independent trade union, occupied the country's main printing houses and virtually shut down the government press--the first stoppage of its kind in the Soviet bloc. This time the aim was not ingher pay or more food. What Solidarity wanted was regular radio and television access to present its side of the issues. The union also demanded an end to what it terms anti-Solidarity propaganda in the official press.

The government promptly denounced the strike as a political act, and the union claimed that police in Crackow and Chelm detained 15 Solidarity members for putting up strike posters. Nowhere, however, were the printers prevented from striking. The government ran off skeleton newspapers on army presses and managed to put out a sizable run of the armed forces daily, Zolnierz Wolnosci. The Communist Party paper, Trybuna Ludu, printed only 150,000 copies of its normal 1.1 million circulation. Most news vendors obeyed a Solidarity call not to sell papers.

At the end of the second day, printers at Poland's largest printing plant, Dom Slowa Polskiego (House of the Polish Word), voted overwhelmingly to continue the protest. They had to be persuaded to return to work by Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa, who told them that immediate concessions by the government were not possible. Walesa warned, however, that if the strike produced no results, another confrontation was "inevitable," and that Solidarity's next target would be the country's radio and television networks. Walesa seemed in unusually low spirits, lamenting, without explaining, that Solidarity members had "become shaky, scared and full of uncertainty." Aides said later that ins dispirited mood was the result of having just learned that his stepfather Stanislaw Walesa had died of a heart attack at his home in Jersey City, N.J.

When the walkout ended, the government first announced that the price of a loaf of bread would quadruple to about 50-c-, then announced a delay on the move. Trybuna Ludu reported that a meat-rationing program would be "reviewed" and that the present monthly allotment of 6.6 lbs. per person might be reduced rather than increased as had been expected. Solidarity spokesmen said they would continue to press for an economic reform package that would include subsidies for consumers with lower incomes. Otherwise, warned the union's Warsaw chapter, the price hikes could lead to "an explosion of uncontrolled social protest." It was a threat the government could not take lightly: the issue of food prices, after all, had touched off the July 1980 strikes that in turn led to the birth of Solidarity. The government now says the union will be consulted prior to the bread price hike.

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