POLAND: A New Party Boss Takes Charge

As a few strikes persist and workers launch free unions

The three-room flat in a crumbling pre-war building in central Warsaw normally houses a family of five. Last week it was suddenly transformed into the bustling headquarters of Warsaw's new independent trade union. Day after day, a steady stream of workers flowed through the kitchen to sign up for membership. In the back bedroom, beneath a photograph of Pope John Paul II, workers sat at a round table discussing union organization with intellectuals and lawyers who had volunteered to advise them. The commotion did not bother Stanislawa Runowska, 68, a round-faced woman who lives in the flat with her daughter and three other relatives. "It is all for the good of the Polish nation," she explained with a smile. "We are patriots."

Similar scenes were taking place elsewhere in the country as workers scrambled to form the independent unions they had been promised by the government in a series of extraordinary strike settlements. Negotiated separately in Gdansk, Szczecin and Jastrzebie, the accords had ended the country's major strikes after two months of labor turmoil. Now the workers were seeking the fruits of their hard-won victory. In Gdansk, the union headed by Lech Walesa, leader of the Lenin Shipyard strike, was already operating out of its new headquarters in the busy Baltic port. In the capital, faculty members of Warsaw University were organizing a teachers' union. The Szczecin-based board of the Polish seamen and dockworkers was planning to submit a motion of secession from the party-controlled Central Council of Trade Unions (C.R.Z.Z.).

Such mass defections threatened to reduce the government's official labor organizations to empty administrative shells. Seeking to avoid that eventuality, newly installed C.R.Z.Z. Chairman Romuald Jankowski called for sweeping reforms aimed at turning the existing bodies into "independent and self-governing organizations for working people." He appealed to workers to remain in the old unions, elect new leaders, and "help us change our policy."

But few workers seemed willing to renounce the right to create their own unions. On the contrary, scattered strikes broke out in more than a dozen factories as skeptical workers demanded assurances that the major agreements signed elsewhere also applied to them.