POLAND : Workers Strike Over Closure of Shipyard

Polish workers began a two-day strike to protest government plans to close the failing Gdansk shipyard, birthplace of the Solidarity labor movement. Shipyard workers erected a cross at the main gate along with a poster listing their demands to the government, which owns 60% of the shipyard. The strikers want a restructuring plan to save the yard and a retraining program for any of the 7,300 employees who are laid off. But even Solidarity founder Lech Walesa, the shipyard worker who became Poland’s first popularly elected president in 1990, says the bankruptcy decision “cannot be questioned on economic grounds.”