John Nichols: Poland's Solidarnosc wants no part of Romney's anti-labor politics

[hue]

http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/john_nichols/john-nichols-poland-s-solidarnosc-wants-no-part-of-romney/article_cd406f54-dac0-11e1-8b76-001a4bcf887a.html

Mitt Romney jetted into Poland Monday as part of a push to win Polish-American votes in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and other battleground states. And how does an American presidential candidate "do" Poland? By posing for photos with Lech Walesa, the former Polish president who -- like Ronald Reagan -- was once a union leader.

But don't think that the grip-and-grin session with Walesa signaled that Romney, who has run a militantly anti-union campaign (even airing television commercials that promote so-called "right-to-work" laws and assaults on public employees), is moving toward a more mainstream stance as regards the rights of labor. Walesa long ago abandoned the union movement for politics, and like Reagan he's tended toward the right side of the political spectrum.

Needless to say, Romney did not celebrate Walesa as a militant trade unionist; nor did the presumptive Republican presidential nominee recognize the connection -- as Reagan once did -- between powerful independent labor organizations and global struggles for freedom and democracy.

So what do the heirs to the Polish labor activism of the 1980s say? What do the hundreds of thousands of activists who maintain the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) union as a major force in today's Poland say?