THE IMMEDIATE future of the famous Gdansk shipyard was secured yesterday, when the European Commission approved €251 million in aid to the birthplace of Poland’s Solidarity trade union.
The yard faced closure when the EU threatened to make it repay huge subsidies received from the Polish government to keep it afloat, cash which gave Gdansk and two other historic Baltic shipyards, Gdynia and Szczecin, an unfair advantage in Europe’s shipbuilding market.
Despite the aid, the yards have failed to build a single ship at profit since Poland joined the EU in 2004.
However, after intense lobbying from the likes of Solidarity founder Lech Walesa, Polish president Lech Kaczynski and prime minister Donald Tusk, the EU yesterday announced a new restructuring plan for Gdansk that should finally wean it off state aid and give it a long-term future.
However, while praising Brussels’s decision not to demand repayment of subsidies, union officials warned that job losses were inevitable under the restructuring scheme, which envisages the closure of two of the shipyard’s three existing slipways.
“This has been one of the longest and most difficult cases I have had to deal with,” said EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes, “but I am very pleased that we have now found a constructive solution for this exceptional place and the people working there.
“Genuine restructuring is the only way to secure stable jobs for the yard’s workers.”
In 1980, Mr Walesa and other workers at Gdansk’s Lenin Shipyards formed Solidarity, the first free trade union in the Soviet bloc.
Solidarity was banned under martial law from 1981-3 but survived underground.
It re-emerged to be in the vanguard of change in 1989, when its members won seats in partially free elections and went on to form a non-communist coalition government. Mr Walesa – who had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 – was elected president of Poland in 1990.
“This is the first monument to the magnificent struggle which allowed us to think about German reunification, the reunification of Europe and globalisation,” Mr Walesa said recently of the shipyard. “Doesn’t this great monument deserve great support, so we can preserve it for future generations?”
The Gdansk shipyard is now owned by Ukrainian company Donbass, while neighbouring Gdynia and Szczecin were bought earlier this year by an investment bank from Qatar.
