With a population of 40 million, Poland represents nearly half the people living in the 10 countries whose governments have applied to join the EU by 2004.

Workers at the shipyard in Szczecin have been holding protests over the capitalist owners’ decision in March to close the facility and stop paying the 6,000 employees. A rally by workers in May demanded back pay and government intervention to keep the shipyard open. Their actions led the government to step in and announce a renationalization of the company, which had been sold to former managers in the 1990s.

A month later, Jacek Piechota, Poland’s minister of the economy, told a rally of 3,000 workers that the banks had refused to back the government plan, forcing the company to declare bankruptcy. Workers pelted Piechota with eggs as he emerged to report the news after a meeting with company officials.

Reporting from Szczecin, Ian Fisher wrote in the New York Times that many shipyard workers blame the private owners for driving the company into the ground. "Polish yuppies!" protest organizer Janusz Gajek said of the bosses. Another added, "What about the rest of us? The relationship between managers and workers has been broken."

The company cites a slowdown in the world market for new ships and a strong zloty, the Polish currency, as two reasons for the plant closure.

In the city of Lublin, workers at a Daewoo truck plant have been staging a hunger strike since the company closed its doors earlier this year. The plant employed 3,800 workers.

The layoffs from the shipyard and Daewoo will add to an official unemployment rate that already stands at 18 percent, with levels hitting 35 percent in some areas. This is up from just under 10 percent in the mid-1990s, when the economy was growing at an annual rate of 7 percent. This year growth has dropped to 1 percent. The economic slowdown in Germany is a major cause of the crisis, since Germany is Poland’s main trading partner.  
 
‘A queue of potential bankruptcies’
The top boss at the German Deutsche Bank in Poland said the plant closings are not confined to Daewoo and the shipyard. "There is a queue of other potential bankruptcies, and it worries me," he told the press.

The banker condemned what he sees as Warsaw’s lack of efforts to sell off enterprises to capitalist concerns or simply shut down other basic industries that are still in state hands. "The government has no guts to reverse the situation in a decisive way," he complained.

Stanislaw Gomulka, a professor at the London School of Economics who has advised Warsaw since 1989, said that 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."

Economic growth and foreign capital investment in Poland during the 1990s led to a rapid expansion of middle-class and emerging capitalist layers, especially in the cities. The country was held up by spokes–people for various imperialist powers as an example of the advantages capitalism holds for the workers states in central and eastern Europe and the republics of the former Soviet Union.

But in the countryside there was noticeably less change. And, with the economic downturn, many working people are questioning the "virtues" of the market economy.  
 
Farmers face crisis
Poland retains one of the largest acreages of agricultural land in Europe. About 33 percent of its population lives in rural areas and 2.6 million people work on the land, or about 25 percent of working people. In the neighboring Czech Republic, by contrast, about 5 percent of people are employed on the land.

Half the country’s 2 million farms are mainly subsistence operations, producing only a small quantity of goods for sale. Around 70 percent of all farms cover less than 20 acres.

In talks on expanding the European Union eastward, EU officials have pushed for opening up sales of land in new member countries and acceptance of a system of subsidies rigged to limit the total funds Poland receives. About half the EU budget of 90 billion euros (1 euro - US 98 cents) currently goes to farm subsidies.

In order to hold off purchases of large swaths of land by wealthy foreign interests, the Polish government sought an 18-year moratorium on private land sales. After Brussels applied pressure, agreement was reached on a 12-year ban on sales to foreigners. Discussions on farm subsidies have been put off until after the elections in Germany, but as the plan now stands farmers in Poland and other new entrants would initially receive only 25 percent of the subsidies afforded farmers in the EU. In addition to vast differences in levels of productivity between farms in Eastern and Western Europe, this subsidy gap would further disadvantage farmers in Poland.

The Financial Times reported that "Germany, like Sweden, the Netherlands and Britain, is adamant direct payments should be linked to a reform of the costly common agricultural policy.... The last thing all four net contributors want is to agree to open-ended subsidies to East European farmers."

The government in Warsaw is led by the Democratic Left Alliance, a social democratic party. The alliance is pushing EU membership, saying that it will bring markets for goods produced in Poland and opportunities for jobs in Western Europe. It has enlisted the Catholic Church hierarchy in the campaign to shore up support in advance of a referendum on joining the EU in 2003.

As in EU member states, national socialist and rightist parties in Poland are building their political currents by campaigning against the EU. They blame the worsening economic crisis on moves by the government to bring Poland into line with the host of regulations stipulated by Brussels. One such party, Self Defense, holds 53 seats in Parliament and is organizing rallies of workers and farmers against the EU.

The party’s leader Andrzej Lepper uses radical and often anti-German demagogy in his campaign. "Sooner or later, every German leader starts talking about the need for living space," he told one press briefing. "History likes to repeat itself. It was different then because Hitler was producing tanks and rifles. The weapons used now are the printing facilities that make dollars and euros."

There are real worries among farmers that they will lose their land with EU membership. "When the borders fall," one farmer told a reporter, "Germans will come, buy up the land, and we will become farmhands. If the union comes, this is what will happen."  
 
 
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