The World : Hungary Workers to Unite

Hungarian workers, attacking the government for squandering their labor, announced plans to set up the country’s first independent blue-collar union, modeled on Poland’s outlawed Solidarity movement. “We think workers’ interests are best defended by workers themselves,” former machine tool worker Bottyan Kiss told a news conference in Budapest in launching Workers’ Solidarity. Half a dozen independent trade unions have been founded in Hungary since May, but all were related to white-collar professions. A Workers’ Solidarity spokesman said the union would fight for wage reform, workers’ self-government and shares in state-owned factories.