Poland Duel of the Deaf

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Faced with the most serious outbreak of labor unrest since placing Poland under martial law more than six years ago, the regime of General Wojciech Jaruzelski seemed oddly uncertain about how to respond, whether to make strategic concessions or to lower the boom. For a while, the government tried a little of both. As the strikes spread to other major industrial centers and the country's universities last week, authorities continued to agree to wage increases in a few cases, acceded to mediation attempts by representatives of the Roman Catholic Church in others -- but always with the explicit warning that stronger measures might be used eventually. In the end, they were. Attacking in the dead of night, more than 2,000 riot police and elite commandos routed several hundred occupying strikers at the Nowa Huta steel mill near Cracow, reportedly injuring at least 40 of them. Meanwhile, police surrounded the more recently occupied Gdansk shipyard, isolating a strike force of about 1,000, which included Lech Walesa, legendary founder of the outlawed Solidarity independent trade union.

The move failed to bring an end to the strikes, which persisted in the form of massive absenteeism at Nowa Huta and some other job sites. The onslaught underscored the Jaruzelski regime's utter inability to find a common language with Poland's restive and embittered workers. The attack seemed to doom the government's ambitious plans for economic restructuring, which depend on the labor force's willingness to make temporary sacrifices while the country's centralized industries are gradually exposed to more and more free-market forces. "Everybody knows what is at stake here," said Walesa, following the Nowa Huta attack. "As of today, the reform has failed."

The regime's reaction exposed its deep ambivalence about allowing political pluralism to creep into the reform program, especially any pluralism that might lead to a reborn Solidarity. Actually, Walesa and other union leaders became involved less as an overtly political force, which they ceased to be after the union was banned in 1981, than as elder statesmen. But even that presence was too much for Poland's Communist leadership. Charging that Solidarity sought only to "evoke crisis and a confrontation," Government Spokesman Jerzy Urban vowed that the regime "had not, does not and will not talk" with union leaders.