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Polish Premier Offers Plan for Shipyard
By REUTERS
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Poland's Prime Minister held out a lifeline to save 2,000 jobs at the Gdansk shipyard today, then accused the Solidarity union of fomenting chaos there by illegal protests.
''Don't try to build a second Albania in Poland,'' Prime Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz warned Solidarity in a speech to Parliament after the union occupied Warsaw ministries on Wednesday and scuffled with the police.
This week Solidarity called nationwide protests against the Government led by Mr. Cimoszewicz's former Communists, demanding help for the shipyard where the union was born in 1980 and battled for the 1989 overthrow of Communist rule.
Mr. Cimoszewicz proposed a rescue package for the yard, where the receiver began dismissing the last 3,800 workers this month. He suggested that the successful Szczecin shipyard would set up, with the use of the Gdansk yard's assets, a new subsidiary to build ships for Poland's merchant shipping company, P.Z.M. He said that the new company would build one ship for a German shipowner and complete another under construction, then build five vessels for the Polish company from 1998 to 2000.
''Such a plan allows employment of about 2,000 workers including about 1,100 in production at the outset,'' he said.
The head of Solidarity, Marian Krzaklewski, made no immediate detailed comment on the proposal, but said he had been appealing to Mr. Cimoszewicz for a year to do something. ''After a year of efforts at dialogue, I hope the proposal put by Premier Cimoszewicz is realistic,'' he said.