Polish Solidarity workers fear end of shipyards

Workers at the ailing Gdansk shipyard, the birthplace of the Solidarity movement, are pinning their hopes on a promised government plan aimed at saving their workplace from going bust.

For the shipyard workers, some former colleagues of Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, closure of the yard would mean a bitter reward for their courage in defying and bringing down communism in Poland.

"Building ships is all I know how to do," Zbigniew Stefanski, who started work at the shipyard in 1974 at the age of 14, said.

"The people who worked here fought for freedom and now some will have to go hungry."

The government is determined to stop that happening and has put forward a plan to restructure and partially privatise yards such as Gdansk to save most of the yards' 12,000 jobs.

But the plan must win the endorsement of the European Union, which says massive government aid for the Polish shipbuilding industry may violate its competition rules.

If Brussels, due to receive the plan this or next week, is not convinced, state-controlled yards in Gdansk, Gdynia and Szczecin could lose some $1.6 billion (Lm0.54 billion) in state aid.

This would force the government to shut the yards, political dynamite for the ruling conservative Law and Justice whose leaders are former trade union activists.

The Gdansk yard's chief executive Andrzej Jaworski, a political appointee and member of Law and Justice, said two "serious investors" from Germany and Greece had already expressed interest in his yard. He said modernising equipment would reduce costs and might give Gdansk a chance to compete with cheaper competitors from Asia and Europe.

The Gdansk shipyard blossomed under communism, building merchant ships for the Soviet Union. Yet its workers were badly paid and mismanagement led to strikes in the 1970s and 1980s.

After communism collapsed in 1989, trade unions blocked the sale of the yard to foreign investors, fearing massive restructuring and layoffs. Subsequent governments avoided radical changes and the yard has lingered on the verge of bankruptcy for years.

"The shipyard is the mother of freedom in Europe. You do not give up on your mother. Everything should be done to save it," Lech Walesa told Reuters.

Experts say the government plan falls short and that only a full privatisation of the shipyards, including job and wage cuts can prevent a collapse.

But Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslaw, the prime minister, who won elections promising to defend workers' rights and bring more state aide into the economy, are against full privatisation.

"The government's plan will not solve any of the yards' problems," Ireneusz Jablonski, an expert from the Adam Smith Centre, an economic think-tank in Warsaw said.

"Politics must get totally out of the shipyards and it should be treated as a regular company, not a stage for political parties," he said.