From: nyxfer%panix.com@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu (N.Y. Transfer)
Subject: WW:E.EUROPE WORKERS FIGHT BACK
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Resent-From: "Rich Winkel" <MATHRICH@MIZZOU1.missouri.edu>
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 21:50:08 GMT


Via The NY Transfer News Service ~ All the News that Doesn't Fit

EASTERN EUROPE WORKERS FIGHT BACK

Class struggle in Poland ...

What are conditions like in Poland two years after the
restoration of capitalism? "Worker discontent is growing as
economic reforms push real incomes down and unemployment up at
state-owned industries, which are struggling to survive in a
newly competitive economy. The July unemployment rate was 13.1
percent," says an Associated Press dispatch. And many more
factories are slated to be closed under the pro-capitalist
government's restructuring plans.

But workers are fighting back. In August a coalition of workers
and farmers presented the regime with a petition demanding pay
raises, an end to price hikes and privatization of industry, and
a "return to the living standards of 1989," before the capitalist
takeover. The coalition comprises Poland's largest union, the
Communist-organized OPZZ; Solidarity '80, a split from Lech
Walesa's Solidarity; and Self Defense, a farmers' organization.

A strike wave is sweeping the country. The regime, having given
up its pretense to represent labor, is threatening to fire 2,500
striking workers at the FSM auto plant. The three-week-old strike
is delaying government plans to sell the plant to Fiat, the
Italian auto monopoly. The workers originally asked for pay equal
to 10 percent of the value of the cars they produce, but scaled
back their demands under government intimidation. In August,
after a strike at the mammoth Gdansk shipyard, dozens of workers
were fired.

But on Sept. 5, the regime was forced to settle with over 1,000
miners who had occupied the Rozbark coal mine in Silesia. A
strike is also in progress at the Ursus tractor factory near
Warsaw.

The government's policy of firing strikers has been
wholeheartedly endorsed by Solidarity head Lech Walesa. Walesa
was portrayed as a workers' leader in the Western media when he
was organizing anti-communist demonstrations in the 1980s.

... in Albania

On Aug. 26 thousands of Albanian workers held the mayor and
police chief of Polican hostage after setting fire to a factory
that the new capitalist government is trying to close. According
to Associated Press reports, the workers shouted slogans praising
Enver Hoxha, the Communist revolutionary who led Albania's 1945
revolution. Hoxha was the country's president and leader of its
Communist Party until his death in 1985.

After the pro-capitalist "Democratic" Party came to power earlier
this year, the Communist Party was banned and its 81-year-old
leader, Nexhimjie Hoxha, who was married to Enver, imprisoned.

The restoration of capitalism is spreading misery throughout
eastern Europe. In Romania the head of the Labor Ministry
admitted that "a growing number of children are being abandoned
as a result of the drop in living standards" caused by President
Iliescu's "free-market" reforms. Thousands of children now live
on the streets in Bucharest and other Romanian cities.

And on Sept. 5, the New York Times reported that Hungarian
farmers are not responding to a government auction of collective
farm property. It quoted agriculture professor Laszlo Torok, who
said land privatization left farmers "high and dry because they
have no machinery and no capital, and the big plants that own
agricultural equipment are going to be raising prices." Farm
machinery was provided free by the overthrown socialist
government.


(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted
if source is cited. For more info contact Workers World,46 W. 21
St., New York, NY 10010; "workers@igc.apc.org".)

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