TANCHO of the Self-Management Council - one of the most active in Poland - most of whose members have come from the underground Solidarnosc."
"Better service to the rank and file"
The Solidarnosc leaders in the enterprise have been concered primarily about strengthening the union: "Here we are strong and they have to reckon with us. But in the small enterprises there have even been cases where the management has formed a union with its own people. The union will be strong when it exists everywhere. For that reason, a few days ago, we issued a statement calling the regional and national organizations to order, demanding that they respond more rapidly to the workers' day-to-day problems and that they use their press better to inform union members of their rights. For example, we learned [from the government press] of the existence of a decree that permits every union local, once it has 150 members, to have a full-timer only a month after it was adopted. This testifies to the weakness of the coordinating structures, which should offer better service to the rank and file."
This critical attitude originated response to the positions taken by the opposition elites after the June elections: "We protested to the deputies of the Civic Parliament Group [OKP] after Kiszczak's election as premier. Already the election of Jaruzelski as president did not go down well, and we felt obliged to speak out against these compromises that went too far. We had to remind them who elected them. That was a universal demand from the workers. The workers' reactions were clear. They went after us, not the deputies, because we were the ones who called on them to vote for those deputies. Some Solidamos members even handed in their cards, although fortunately this was not the general attitude."
The galloping inflation is the workers'
The unionists in the enterprises do not understand their leadership's timid attitude toward this. Zygmunt Klatka said: "The regional and national leaderships should react to the price rises, or at least explain in their press what the situation is. Since the Round Table, Lech Walesa has not taken any position on this.
Crisis reaches Police forces men and formation of an independent police union.
IN 1980-81, the Polish police did not manage, • A possibility for rehiring policemen fired because of reaction from Solidarnosc. Now they are determined not to And those who tried it were very quickly fired, without any attempts in May-June 1981, to form an independent union. all countries in the world. On September 15, Gazeta, the Solidarnosc daily, pub- • The possibility of getting a passport valid for travel to miss the chance offered by the liberalization. In Piekary Slaskie, in Upper Silesia, on September 7, in an ter of the interior and deputy premier, Czeslaw Kiszczak (a lished a second open letter addressed this time to the minisopen letter to the new premier, 54 policemen demanded that member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party), in the police be separated from the Security Service (SB, politi- which 70 policemen in Piekary Slaskie announced that their cal police), that the political department and nomenklatura decision to leave the Communist Party was inspired by his system be abolished in the police force, that the posts trans- declared intention to "depoliticize the Ministry of the Interiferred since 1975 to the SB be restored to the police force, and that the riot police detachments (ZOMO) be reorganized. However ambiguous some of the policemen's demands
Declaring that they "want to be a state and not a party may be, their demand to be able to form their own union tespolice force," they announced that they have left the Com- tifies to the onset of a crisis in the repressive apparatus, a munist Party. Finally, they raised the following demands: crisis whose first symptoms appeared already at the June
• Total depoliticization of the police force, enabling ver- legislative elections, in which the Solidarnosc candidates sons of various opinions and religions to work in the profes- got a not insignificant number of votes in the polling stations reserved for the army and the police. This demand
• Setting up of a system of judicial protection for police- deserves support from Solidarnosc.
October 16, 1989 sion. On the other hand, every day the TV news interviews Martyniuk of the OPZZ, who has no qualms about demanding a cost-of-living bonus of 40,000 zlotys instead of the 15,000 granted now. This does not fail to make an impact."
Malgorzata Calinska said: "Now, food prices are being marked up twice a week, by dozens of percent. So, the 15,000 zlotys don't solve anything."
"Tadeusz Mazowiecki's government is our government," Zygmunt Klatka said. The Solidarnosc leaders at POLAR consider that it is a "transitional government," and that its composition should reflect that. "People are not worried about who takes what ministerial portfolio. What is important is that Mazowiecki heads it. I know people who cried with joy when they learned of that. Mazowiecki has become the focus of immense hope, even if everyone knows that he has inherited a very difficult situation.
### Demand for automatic cost-of-living bonus
"People are expecting first of all that he will make quick decisions about the soaring prices and the daily increases in the cost of food. In the resolution we addressed to the regional and national leaderships of Solidarnosc, we demanded that the government offer honest and serious compensation for rising prices by an automatic cost-of-living bonus — not 17,000 zlotys, when the OPZZ is demanding 40,000, and when in fact it may turn out tomorrow that the proper sum will be 70,000 or even 120,000 zlotys.
"If this government decides that the cost-of-living bonus should be so much, and that the sum will vary according to the evolution of prices, then the pressure for higher wages would stop by itself. Moreover, the government needs to do something to stop these rising prices, for example, by cutting out the middlemen. If this is not done, people are going to get the idea that our government has somedespite thing to gain from these frenetic price rises, so that it can stop them later when they are already very high and thereby score an easy success. Already some people are beginning to suggest such things." Eliminating bureaucratic red
While they hope that the new government will manage quickly to stop rising prices and compensate for them by a general cost-of-living bonus, the POLAR unionists are nonetheless aware that the real key to improving the economic situation lies in reorganizing production, so that it can be increased and costs reduced:
"In the first place, the tax problem has to be straightened out throughout the country, so that the enterprises can func-
The union organizations and self-management councils have to organize a transfer of wage-earners to production. This has to be accompanied by wage increases for those who leave the offices for the production lines, so that they will immediately see the gain from such reorganization. This means eliminating red
"For example, in production all the workers get work cards for every task. So, before starting my job I have to wait for an inspector to decide how much time I should spend for each task. Then the technician prepares a card for the worker to fill in. Then, I have to take the card to the foreman, who then transmits it to his who gives it to the accountants Sometimes I can have up to 50 cards like this in a workday, and at the end of the month it takes an army of clerks to calcu-
"If this elaborate inspection were done away with, every worker would gain time for production, and at least a hundred people occupied with doing these useless checks could be transferred to the production lines [where there is a shortage of personnel]. This is only one example. Any number could be cited. Throughout
POLAND the country, by changing the organization of work, immense labor forces could be freed up through getting rid of this bureau cracy. On a nationwide basis, there are too many departments, too rungs, too much apparatus. In this area, the territorial self-management bodies will have their work cut out for them."
The shortage of some daily consump tion items — especially cigarettes — cannot be explained, the POLAR leaders said, by the disorganization of production. They echoed suspicions often heard in the store lines: "We are afraid that a lot of goods have been hidden in the stores, like in 1981, and that the Rakowski government, which continued to run the country two months after it resigned, deliberately had goods put into storage in order to aggravate the situation."
"Today, we need to re-unify
Solidarnos"
When I asked them about the possibilities for developing trade-union and social monitoring of distribution, which had started in 1981, they remained skeptical. Zygmunt Klatka said: "Today, we are in another stage of changes. Today, such monitoring should be done by our government, by our deputies and senators. The level of consciousness is higher today. People know that they have given a mandate to someone to do all that. On the other hand, at the rank-and-file level, our main task is to rebuild the trade-union structures, so that they can include at least 50% to 60% of the working people.
"In this work, we need unity in the union and to put an end to the quarrels between the radicals and the moderates, between the old and new leaders, because these divisions are maintaining distrust of the union as a whole and keeping people from joining
"Today, we need to re-unify Solidarnosc and the upcoming congress of the union, which should be held soon, will certainly do so." *
• #171 International Viewpoint
----- photo credits and running heads -----
7
Declaration of the
Wroclaw Regional
Committee of the