Workers at the bankrupt Gdansk shipyard read the first issue of the strike bulletin during a two-day sit-in protesting the Polish government's decision to close down the birth-place of the Solidarity labor movement. Ship-yard workers erected a cross at the main gate along with a poster listing their demands to the government, which owns 60 percent of the shipyard. The strikers want a restructuring plan to save the yard and a re-training program for any of the 7,300 employees laid off. But even Solidarity founder Lech Walesa, the shipyard worker who became Poland's first popularly elected president in 1990, says the bankruptcy "cannot be questioned on economic grounds. . . . It is true that the shipyard should have done more in the past few years (to restructure), but nobody helped it," said Walesa, who lost his re-election bid in November to former Communist Aleksander Kwasniewski.
