>In Communist times, no one was louder than Poland's famously feisty shipyard workers about the state's inability to provide a decent standard of living. So now it seems a cruel joke that, as the sparkle fades from the market economy, it is private enterprise that has failed them.<
it's worse than a cruel joke. The labor union (Solidarity) wanted democracy, not privatization (capitalism). But what they got was capitalism, not democratization.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
> As Poland Endures Hard Times, Capitalism Comes Under Attack
> By IAN FISHER NYT , 6/12/02
>
>
> SZCZECIN, Poland ¯ In Communist times, no one was louder than
> Poland's famously feisty shipyard workers about the state's
> inability to provide a decent standard of living. So now it
> seems a cruel joke that, as the sparkle fades from the market
> economy, it is private enterprise that has failed them.
>
> Since March, the Szczecin shipyard has been closed, and 6,000
> workers have not been paid. When violence loomed, the
> government stepped in, announcing a plan in May that would,
> for the first time, renationalize a Polish company.
>
> "It is certainly very abnormal," said Bogoslaw Rydzenski, 48,
> a worker. "No one could have predicted this."
>
> These are hard times in Poland, which grew for nearly 10
> straight years into a country of stocked shelves, giant malls
> and impressive self-confidence ¯ a 40-million-strong symbol
> of Central Europe's post-Communist hopes.
>
> Now, the will to continue privatization and other reforms,
> and even the desire to join the European Union, have flagged.
> The story is much the same around the region, as the
> transformation from gangly state economies has brought
> material comfort, but also insecurity and a new set of
> inequalities. In Poland, indeed, the very notion that
> Western-style capitalism will work in the eastern nation that
> embraced it perhaps most heartily is under attack.
>
> "There is an apropos graffiti," Krzysztof Bledowski, an
> economist, said as he sat in a cafe in downtown Warsaw. He
> pointed across the street to a car parts shop, where someone
> had scrawled on a wall: "Free market, enslaved people."
>
> "It's the spirit of the day," he said. "The mood has shifted.
> Capitalism is not seen by many people as a system for
> justice, growth, better times for kids and so on."
>
> What is happening now is not economic collapse of the kind
> that engulfed Russia in the 1990's.
>
> Many companies are doing well, and Poland appears set to move
> into the European Union in 2004. But there is a serious
> slowdown, compounded by what many experts say is political
> dawdling and disagreement about how to fix it.
>
> Around the region, the cost to top leaders is high: Second
> terms here are rare, and experts say Poland's new coalition
> government, led by the socialist Democratic Left Alliance,
> will be no exception if it cannot reverse this downturn.
>
> Last year, growth dropped to just 1 percent. Unemployment
> this year hit 18 percent, the highest in the post-Communist
> era, and there are real worries of street disturbances and
> protests in the largest nation up for joining the European
> Union, if more people lose their jobs.
>
> This downturn, Mr. Bledowski said, is "causing a lot of soul
> searching. People are revising a lot of assumptions and expectations."
>
> Some experts worry that the problems at the shipyard in
> Szczecin (pronounced SHTESH-een), once the German Stettin,
> may usher in an era of greater economic control by the state.
> Although the center-left government elected last year says
> Szczecin is a singular case, there are already calls for
> intervention over a Daewoo car plant that went bankrupt this
> year and where angry workers are staging a hunger strike.
>
> "There is a queue of other potential bankruptcies, and it
> worries me," said Hubert A. Janiszewski, managing director of
> Deutsche Bank in Poland.
>
> Unlike many other former Soviet bloc states, whose economies
> alternately surged and faltered, Poland's trajectory since
> the early 1990's has been largely up. Economic growth in the
> mid-1990's hit 7 percent. Unemployment dipped for a time to
> below 10 percent. Foreign investment flooded in. "People felt
> you could throw in a little money and watch it expand into
> enormous piles of cash," said Tony Housh, the former leader
> of the American Chamber of Commerce in Warsaw.
>
> But Poland remained two nations economically. Cities,
> especially Warsaw, prospered, as poverty ground on in the
> countryside, especially on the many inefficient farms. Many
> large- and medium-size private business did well, more or
> less masking big problems in overstaffed nationalized
> companies, in coal mining, steel and chemical production.
>
> Then in 2000 and 2001, the world economy turned, especially
> that of Poland's main trading partner, Germany. Monetary
> policies, aimed at staving off inflation, kept the national
> currency, the zloty, strong and interest rates high.
> Unemployment surged as companies, feeling the pinch of
> reduced demand, shed workers. Reduced tax receipts and
> increased spending by the old government during the elections
> last September ratcheted up the budget deficit to crisis levels.
>
> In the disillusionment with the new economy and the
> mainstream parties of both right and left, fringe parties,
> particularly Self Defense, led by a radical populist, Andrzej
> Lepper, have surged.
>
> Mr. Lepper talks often about a middle road between communism
> and capitalism, greater state protections over the free
> market ¯ a notion that appeals these days to many Poles and
> resonates especially here in Szczecin. Many shipyard workers
> say private management drove the company into the ground.
>
> "Polish yuppies!" spat out Janusz Gajek, a 43-year-old worker
> here who led worker protests after the plant here closed in
> March. A fellow protest organizer, Roman Nizurski, 46, added:
> "What about the rest of us? The relationship between managers
> and workers has been broken."
>
> Poor management decisions, in fact, are often cited as a
> reason for the shipyard's problems. But there are others: a
> downturn in the worldwide shipbuilding market; the strong
> zloty, which increases the prices of ships; problems with a
> new prototype tanker. In March, banks simply stopped extending credit.
>
> Many workers say they are not happy with the state plans to
> insert itself again into the shipyard ¯ after all, it was the
> Solidarity trade union in the Baltic shipyards that led the
> fight against communism in the 1980's. Equally, they know
> there is no other choice to save their jobs.
>
> "We know this is some kind of temporary salvation," said Mr.
> Gajek. "A rope has been thrown."
>
> Mr. Janiszewski, of Deutsche Bank, sees a major problem in
> state intervention because, he said, "the government has no
> guts to reverse the situation in a decisive way."
>
> Reducing the deficit and privatizing the big industries still
> under state control means taking on the powerful unions and
> making more job cuts at a time when high unemployment has
> become a real political liability.
>
> Government officials declined repeated requests for interviews.
>
> But Stanislaw Gomulka, a prominent economist who advises the
> finance minister, contended that the present government
> inherited many economic problems from the previous
> administration, while acknowledging that Prime Minister
> Leszek Miller and his team have been slow to impose their own reforms.
>
> "The government is a little bit afraid that if it imposes
> radical laws that are opposed by the trade unions that we
> will have street fights, demonstrations, large political
> fights," said Mr. Gomulka, a professor at the London School
> of Economics who has advised governments in Poland since
> 1989. That, he said, could strengthen populists like Mr.
> Lepper even more. "They want to see if a consensus can be reached."
>
> Mr. Gomulka predicted that reforms ¯ cutting taxes, easing
> bureaucratic burdens on vital small and medium-size
> enterprises ¯ will come. Poland, he said, remains strong in
> its foundations, an opinion shared by many economists and
> business executives.
>
> William V. Carey, a former golf professional from Florida,
> came to Poland in 1991 to explore exporting Polish
> agriculture. With a quick look around at the empty shop
> shelves, he decided it might be better to bring in goods
> instead. Starting simply by importing Fosters' beer ¯ before
> the Polish beer industry, like so many others, took off ¯ he
> slowly built his company into the nation's largest
> distributor of beer, wine and spirits.
>
> His company is flourishing, and he remains optimistic,
> despite Poland's backward bureaucracy, poor roads (of special
> concern to a distribution company), and the downturn.
>
> "It is quite a remarkable success," said Mr. Carey, now 37,
> sitting in the new Warsaw headquarters of his business, the
> Central European Distribution Corporation. "I viewed Poland
> as 40 years behind when I got here, and it is just a few
> years behind now."
>
> But, he said, Poland's new business class is learning a rough
> lesson from the downturn: "That there is a lot more to
> running a company than just getting it up. It is a lot of
> sweat to get it into progressive growth ¯ not just to do well
> when the economy is growing."
>
