The famous Gdansk shipyard in Poland has been given an ultimatum by the European Commission: cut back or close down. Poland stands accused of breaching rules on state subsidies, designed to ensure fair competition.
“This shipyard is like a mother to us,” Lech Walesa says. “Do you liquidate your own mother?” He does not say kill, or strangle, or murder. He says liquidate.
The man who founded the independent Solidarity trade union in Gdansk in 1980 — and later became president of Poland — now sits in a spacious office, in one of the ancient gates that guard the old city. His famous moustache is as white today as the eagle on the Polish flag.
The symbols of Solidarity have grown up all around this shipyard: the monument to the Trade Union — three tall crosses, adorned with anchors and a museum dedicated to Solidarity, and all who have drawn inspiration from her struggle, called Roads to Freedom. But the news of the EU ultimatum hangs more heavily than a giant crane overhead. This may be a scene of desolation, but there is no litter.
With a superhuman effort to control his anger, Solidarity trade union leader Karol Guzikiewicz speaks, as though he is addressing a vast crowd at the gates.
Karol was a young worker here when Solidarity was founded. He rose through the movement to become a seasoned union activist, a worker participating in the workers’ defeat of a workers’ state.
In a whirlwind tour of the shipyard, he drives fast and furiously through the crumbling industrial landscape — over the cobbles, the old rail tracks, the broken Tarmac — and reverses into a large rubbish bin. It topples over, but Karol single-handedly heaves it back onto its wheels.
By the gate, an elderly lady carries away a poplar branch that has fallen in the wind. White clouds scud across a sky of Baltic blue. A sun, which is torturing countries further south, is gentler on the skin here. Seagulls wheel and cry news of the Brussels ultimatum like newsboys when war breaks out.
Only three slipways still operate, leased today from a Danish owner, until 2010. Brussels is demanding that they close two immediately, leaving only one.
Karol breathes heavily. “Do these people not realise,” he asks, “that you cannot build a ship with only one slipway? You have to have two.”
In distant Brussels, the European Commission spokesman on competition issues, Jonathan Todd, insists that Gdansk has been given “a last chance”. It has until August 21 to comply.
Two-thirds of the land here has already been sold to developers. The shipyard says this has not been taken into account in the bureaucrats’ calculations.
The European Commission, the workers mutter darkly, stands on the side of property speculators, who want the remaining land as well — and no rump shipyard on their expensive doorsteps. The shipyard stands right on the edge of the old city.
We have orders for new ships, insists Andrzej Jaworski, the general manager. “Container vessels for Germany, research ships for Norway, vessels to transport liquid gas. And we have investors. The European Commission should be helping European yards compete with the yards of Asia, not closing us down.”
The ownership of Polish shipyards is devilishly complicated. Since the return of capitalism, they have been subsidised, sold and splintered.
Now the European Commission has accepted restructuring plans put forward by other Polish yards in Gdynia and Szczecin, but rejected that put forward by Gdansk.
If no new plan is put forward by the deadline, it will have to pay back 35m ($70m) in state aid, insists the Commission. Money that Gdansk claims it never received. It went to the others.
How can a union defend its members in the 21st Century?
“If necessary,” says Karol, “we will go to Strasbourg. And tear down the masts, the flagpoles we gave as a gift to the European Parliament when Poland joined the European Union. But I hope it won’t come to that.”
BBC News
