Sejm old story
We are going to be hearing a lot more about union blackmail in the coming months because it is well and truly back in fashion. The latest spate is merely a hint of things to come. The advance of Europe will simply sharpen the appetite of the union mandarins to fight for the last ounce of their power, and it is the feckless buying off of labour intimidation over the years which has made an enormous collision one day inevitable.
Solidarnoć activists at the local level are currently exploiting the unpopularity of the government for political ends. One would like to think the protests in Silesia, the pushing and shoving in Warsaw, really are about the fate of the thousands more miners who are going to be made redundant. But that is only partially true. The shadow forces of AWS-in-exile seek to humiliate Miller's administration as it stands at the edge of perhaps its greatest visible, and very likely only, triumph, namely admission to the European concert of nations. Knowing that all governments here kneel in the end to union obduracy of this kind, they are on to a winner. The ruse can be fished out time and time again.
None of it will make the slightest difference to the mines in Silesia. They will close, just the same, and the honest toilers employed there will be tipped out of work into an environment where no-one has had a thought or care to make new provisions for them, or their families. It is impossible to "save" the coal industry, just as it is impossible to protect - that vastly overused word - any other human activity from the forces of the market. The postponement of a sensible programme of scaling down within the coal industry will make the transitition to the challenges of Europe far more difficult, and taken alongside the reluctance to sort out other chronically sick industries such as steel, the shipyards, sugar, defence, and the railways, will burden the country for much longer than is necessary with the costs of servicing these dinosaurs who leech on the efficient private sector.
One could only feel sorrow for economy minister Jacek Piechota telling his baiters in the Sejm that it was impossible to maintain every job in the coal mines at the expense of the country. He spoke nothing but commonsense truth, a commodity which is rarely given much respect among politicians of all persuasions in this country. He might have gone on to say, but sensibily bit his tongue, that his own prime minister is central to the issue of finding a solution, since the only "European policy" he has is to suck as much money as possible from the EU budget and transfer it intraveneously to these wasteful activities.
A perfect illustration of the government's policy of "protection," of trying to buck the market, is visible in the chaos around the sugar industry. This socialised production company ushered into existence as a national champion has turned instead into a Frankensteinian monster. The price of sugar is low, thanks to market forces, but the production company's costs are too high, so it is increasingly excluded from its own market. There is no possibility of exporting because sugar is even cheaper abroad. Presto! The answer is for the government to raise the price of sugar! Come back, the United Workers Party, all is forgiven!
No hint of the free market or consumer market, nor of the effect upon the purses of the poor and the underprivileged, especially the elderly. No sir, this is all about keeping a fantastically inefficient domestic sugar company, and the cronies who run it, in business. Except that it is not in business at all, but in a state of super-suspended animation until the market finally knocks the stuffing out of it, which is exactly what will happen.
The country's grotesquely inefficient coal mines are bound in the same direction. The market for coal is imploding. Gas is abundant and cheaper, and power stations are easy to convert. When it is cheaper to bring coal from Queensland, Australia to European shores, the point is effectively made. There has been a modestly successful programme of manpower rundown, but it was bound to reach a sticky point when the miners and the local activists driving them realised the administration was edging close to a form of restructuring known simply as bankruptcy. That, and the coincidence of the final European negotiations, tied the string around the parcel.
Every government for the past 12 years has known the coal industry was doomed and that together with rundowns in other basic smokestack industries such as steel, there would be a severely deleterious effect on Silesia. Frederick the Great thought of the province as the jewel in his crown, thanks to the riches won from its soil. Today it is a black country, soured by pollution, in earnest need of re-invention. Instead of fudging and compromising, an imaginitive government would create a Silesian Development Authority, a partnership between private enterprise and local government, a lean and mean machine briefed to win new enterprises and work for those who must go through the process of de-industrialisation. A body manned not by dud civil servants unwanted elsewhere, but genuine private sector "can-do" achievers - and heresy, even some of them from abroad.
We'll see. That would take a breadth of imagination, courage and a conversion to long-term planning. Not to mention serving notice to quit on fossilised trade unions which exist only to anchor the country in the past and preserve their leaders clinging to the life belts of power.
Solidarnoć activists at the local level are currently exploiting the unpopularity of the government for political ends. One would like to think the protests in Silesia, the pushing and shoving in Warsaw, really are about the fate of the thousands more miners who are going to be made redundant. But that is only partially true. The shadow forces of AWS-in-exile seek to humiliate Miller's administration as it stands at the edge of perhaps its greatest visible, and very likely only, triumph, namely admission to the European concert of nations. Knowing that all governments here kneel in the end to union obduracy of this kind, they are on to a winner. The ruse can be fished out time and time again.
None of it will make the slightest difference to the mines in Silesia. They will close, just the same, and the honest toilers employed there will be tipped out of work into an environment where no-one has had a thought or care to make new provisions for them, or their families. It is impossible to "save" the coal industry, just as it is impossible to protect - that vastly overused word - any other human activity from the forces of the market. The postponement of a sensible programme of scaling down within the coal industry will make the transitition to the challenges of Europe far more difficult, and taken alongside the reluctance to sort out other chronically sick industries such as steel, the shipyards, sugar, defence, and the railways, will burden the country for much longer than is necessary with the costs of servicing these dinosaurs who leech on the efficient private sector.
One could only feel sorrow for economy minister Jacek Piechota telling his baiters in the Sejm that it was impossible to maintain every job in the coal mines at the expense of the country. He spoke nothing but commonsense truth, a commodity which is rarely given much respect among politicians of all persuasions in this country. He might have gone on to say, but sensibily bit his tongue, that his own prime minister is central to the issue of finding a solution, since the only "European policy" he has is to suck as much money as possible from the EU budget and transfer it intraveneously to these wasteful activities.
A perfect illustration of the government's policy of "protection," of trying to buck the market, is visible in the chaos around the sugar industry. This socialised production company ushered into existence as a national champion has turned instead into a Frankensteinian monster. The price of sugar is low, thanks to market forces, but the production company's costs are too high, so it is increasingly excluded from its own market. There is no possibility of exporting because sugar is even cheaper abroad. Presto! The answer is for the government to raise the price of sugar! Come back, the United Workers Party, all is forgiven!
No hint of the free market or consumer market, nor of the effect upon the purses of the poor and the underprivileged, especially the elderly. No sir, this is all about keeping a fantastically inefficient domestic sugar company, and the cronies who run it, in business. Except that it is not in business at all, but in a state of super-suspended animation until the market finally knocks the stuffing out of it, which is exactly what will happen.
The country's grotesquely inefficient coal mines are bound in the same direction. The market for coal is imploding. Gas is abundant and cheaper, and power stations are easy to convert. When it is cheaper to bring coal from Queensland, Australia to European shores, the point is effectively made. There has been a modestly successful programme of manpower rundown, but it was bound to reach a sticky point when the miners and the local activists driving them realised the administration was edging close to a form of restructuring known simply as bankruptcy. That, and the coincidence of the final European negotiations, tied the string around the parcel.
Every government for the past 12 years has known the coal industry was doomed and that together with rundowns in other basic smokestack industries such as steel, there would be a severely deleterious effect on Silesia. Frederick the Great thought of the province as the jewel in his crown, thanks to the riches won from its soil. Today it is a black country, soured by pollution, in earnest need of re-invention. Instead of fudging and compromising, an imaginitive government would create a Silesian Development Authority, a partnership between private enterprise and local government, a lean and mean machine briefed to win new enterprises and work for those who must go through the process of de-industrialisation. A body manned not by dud civil servants unwanted elsewhere, but genuine private sector "can-do" achievers - and heresy, even some of them from abroad.
We'll see. That would take a breadth of imagination, courage and a conversion to long-term planning. Not to mention serving notice to quit on fossilised trade unions which exist only to anchor the country in the past and preserve their leaders clinging to the life belts of power.
