Walesa, Poland’s Ex-Leader, Returns to Job at Shipyard

GDANSK, Poland —  Down on his luck, strapped for cash, but still very much the master showman of Eastern Europe, Lech Walesa came back to work Tuesday at the shipyard where he started his career 29 years ago as a simple electrician.

“I’ve always felt like a shipyard worker, no matter where I was at a given time,” he said upon reporting for work at the Gdansk shipyard for the first time since taking a leave of absence more than six years ago.

The early morning return of Walesa--founder of the Solidarity trade union, Nobel Peace Prize winner, first freely elected president of democratic Poland--to his $250-a-month job in a dingy redbrick workshop was as peculiar as it was telling.

He arrived just before 6:30 a.m. in the back seat of a government-issued Mercedes-Benz, chauffeured by two bodyguards with coiffed hair and natty suits and ties. Under Polish law, the car and escorts are the only perks he retains after five years in the presidential palace--the main reason Walesa, a father of eight, has made it known he needs his old job back.

“For him as a man, this is embarrassing, and for us Poles it should be a moment of shame,” said Father Henryk Jankowski, a longtime Solidarity supporter who presented the electrician-turned-president-turned-electrician with a package of screwdrivers. “I have come here because I am his friend . . . and today I can demonstrate my friendship.”

The truth of the matter, Walesa said during an interview, is that he has no real interest in trading his tweed jacket and leather briefcase for bib overalls and a toolbox. Once an electrician, always an electrician--but how can a time-clock worker keep the demanding schedule of a former head of state and a living legend?

“I am going to come to work in a nicer car than the shipyard manager, and I am looking for a special armchair for my bodyguards so they can make sure I am not threatened by something as I do my work,” Walesa, 52, said in the interview. “What other president in the world is going to do something like this? You don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

Walesa dutifully collected his new employee ID, his time card and his locker assignment, and even posed for photos at his workbench with two shop mates. But after Mr. President--as almost everyone still calls him--was gone, his co-workers said they doubted he would turn up again.

“We are not bothered by it,” said Dariusz Grempka, a 14-year employee of the shipyard. “When he wasn’t here before, we had to do all of his work as well.”

Walesa and the shipyard management also hinted that his blue-collar revival may fall short of its advance billing.

Having just returned from speaking engagements in Sweden and Denmark, he is scheduled to leave next week for a lecture tour of the United States. He also needs one day a week to tend to his newly established Lech Walesa Institute in Warsaw. He plans to keep hours at an office in the Solidarity headquarters in Gdansk, and he wants to travel around Poland organizing voters ahead of next year’s parliamentary elections.

He also has promised to help the shipyard, which is on the brink of financial collapse, look for a foreign investor to bail it out. The Polish government, fed up with carrying the shipbuilder’s ballooning debts, placed newspaper ads Tuesday seeking buyers for the state’s 60% stake.

“I welcomed him back. He [was] a head of state and deserves respect,” said shipyard president Ryszard Goluch after meeting with Walesa over tea. “But I don’t think his working again as an electrician will be possible at all.”

Walesa’s predicament may be resolved as early as next week, when Poland’s government of former Communists considers long-awaited legislation on presidential pensions. After stepping down in December, Walesa received a farewell bonus of nearly $8,000, but that money has dried up and no other payments are required.

Walesa’s showy homecoming undoubtedly nudged the government along on the pension question--a goal he acknowledged. If Parliament grants him a pension, he said, he will give up on the idea of working at the shipyard.

“I wouldn’t blame him one bit,” said Jerzy Jasinski, who shares a workbench with Walesa. “If I got a pension, I would get out of here immediately. I’ve wasted 18 years here.”

Jasinski’s gloom pervaded the shipyard. Unlike many other Walesa spectacles that have electrified it over the past two decades, this one fell flat for nearly everyone--even his most faithful admirers.

When Walesa returned to the shipyard in 1983 after being freed from prison--Poland’s Communist leader, Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, had ordered him arrested the year before--thousands of workers greeted him. This time, only a handful even took notice, and those who did were mostly drawn by the frantic display of journalists from around the world chasing his speeding Mercedes down the shipyard’s unkempt roads.

“People here are mainly thinking about themselves right now,” said Wojciech Kowalczyk, who sat smoking a cigarette in one of the electric carts that Walesa used to repair. “No one knows if they will have a job tomorrow.”