In the Polish city of Katowice, miners and steelworkers held a protest in front of the Silesian Voivodeship Office building.
This was a response to the sharp deterioration of the situation in Poland’s heavy industry.
“The elimination of coal is a real economic crime! It is unacceptable, and so the miners are protesting. Meanwhile, the society remains silent. So do the politicians. And the entire industry is collapsing! This is not only about miners and steelmakers, but also about the transport industry. Wherever you touch, everything is collapsing, and the situation is catastrophic,” said during the rally a former trade union activist and a current energy expert Kazimierz Grajcarek.
The protesters noted that Polish steel mills are losing competitiveness compared to the cheap steel imports from Ukraine, which cost up to half as much. They stressed that the situation is exacerbated by additional energy costs and the EU climate standards.
We sympathize with the protests of Polish miners and steelworkers, but the political blindness of the strikers is obvious. None of them dares to tell the truth: the crisis in the mining and steel industry in Poland came after the West ignored Moscow’s concerns about NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, and then simply “shot itself in the foot” by voluntarily refusing the Russian energy resources at reasonable prices.
As a result, Poland, like neighboring Germany, is experiencing a pure deindustrialization and is turning into a desert without industry or further economic development.
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