Polish students strike

Press, 10 November 1980, Page 8

Polish students strike

NZPA-Reuter Warsaw Some 1000 medical students in the Polish port of Gdansk went on strike on Friday to support teachers and health care workers occupying a district government office there, union sources said yesterday. A spokesman for Solidarity, Poland’s biggest independent union organisation, said about 250 people occupied a government office on Friday after negotiations over wages and other concerns with the Government deadlocked.

The occupied office is near the giant Lenin shipyards, centre of the recent strikes by hundreds of thousands of workers across Poland. The widening protest in Gdansk came two days before an expected court decision on

a crucial revision in Solidarity’s charter. The union has promised renewed strikes if the Supreme Court ruling is not to its liking. The official news agency PAP, meanwhile, reported that joint Soviet-Polish manoeuvres had taken place in the country recently. The report surprised some observers since such manoeuvres usually go unreported. The Rumanian President (Mr Nicolae Ceausescu) discounted the possibility that Soviet forces might intervene against Poland’s independent labour union movement. In Stockholm during a State visit to Sweden, Mr Ceausescu said: “The Soviet leaders have said that it is a pre-

blem the Poles have to solve : by themselves with no outside ’ involvement.” Solidarity said it represented 10 million workers out of a total work force of 18 million in all sectors and 13 million in the Government-con-trolled sector. Communist Party membership is believed to be less than three million. Solidarity’s leader, Lech Walesa, visited the Gdansk protesters on Friday to show his support, a union spokesman said. Uniformed State police cordoned-off the building on Friday, but left yesterday allowing visitors to come and go. Bus and tram drivers struck for an hour in several Polish cities on Friday in a prelude to a possible national strike this week.