Brussels, 30/08/2007 (Agence Europe) - The Conference of Presidents of the European Parliament political groups accepted, on Thursday 30 August, the proposal put forward by the French leader of the European United Left, Francis Wurtz, calling on the Commission to issue a statement during the next plenary session in Strasbourg (3-6 September) on the threatened closure of the Gdansk shipyards (see EUROPE 9490). The Commission is invited to make a declaration on the morning of Tuesday 4 September when MEPs will discuss the fate of the 3,000 shipyard workers. On Wednesday, another actor took part in the debate when the president of the Polish Senate, Bogdan Borusewicz, sent a letter to Brussels, drawing attention to the specific nature of the Gdansk shipyard and warning against any reduction in the yard's production capacity.
In the letter to Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, Mr Borusewicz stresses that the shipyard is not just a place where ships are built but “one of the most important icons of contemporary Poland, the place where workers effectively took a stand against the Communist regime for the first time”. The shipyard's difficult situation is not, he says, simply the result of unsuccessful streamlining but mainly the consequence of political decisions taken by the Communist governments before 1989.
“The closure of two of the three docks in the Gdansk shipyard means that it will stop building ships, and that it will no longer be able to build for other market players”, Mr Borusewicz writes. He states, moreover, that it would be possible to save Gdansk with “rapid privatisation”. “Closure of the site would mean failure of European solidarity and would deprive the families that depend on the shipyard for their livelihood of all hope”, he said, recalling that it is the “place where a major social movement, Solidarnosc, was born”. On Friday 31 August, a trade union delegation will be in Brussels to protest against the plans of the Commission, which believes that the shipyard's production capacity must be reduced if it is to receive State aid. The Commission is still examining the information forwarded to it by officials at the shipyard at its request on 21 August, and concerning restructuring of the Gdansk yard. The dispute concerns the number of docks to be closed. In its July decision, the Commission said that, only if two of the three docks were closed, would the yard be eligible for State aid. Fearing that the reduction in production capacity would put off potential buyers, Warsaw initially expressed the wish to keep two docks in activity (see EUROPE 9484). The new plans forwarded by the shipyard management now propose closure of all docks and the construction of a floating dock able to take up part of the production. (aby).