Yesterday excavation in Budryk coalmine was finally started. The 46-day-long strike ended on Thursday 31 of January. The agreement concluded that day gave Budryk miners 10% increase in salaries which makes 490 PLN gross (average per capita) this year plus 2.2 thou PLN gross (average per capita) of compensation for the previous year. Another crucial part of the agreement is to set up working team to finish standardization of salaries within JSW group by the end of 2010. The agreement looks like a relief to everybody both the strikers and JSW representatives who calculated their losses. They amount to 90m PLN. With such a loss a continuation of a protest and inability to reach an agreement seemed annoying and irrational. So seemed Budryk miners demands. In the last days of conflict striking miners were rather presented as the ones who want to stop decent fellows from work. This was a general picture in the mainstream media. Can we find any grounds for that prolonged protest? The committee leader Krzysztof Labadz described Budryk as modern profitable coalmine implying the miners working there should have salaries at least on the same level as in other JSW companies. JSW CEO Mr Zagorowski claimed he was all the time supporting the “standardization of salaries”. Then why was it so difficult to get there?

Only weekly NIE (for many press readers considered media outcast) dares to say strike’s context was different from what was presented in the mainstream media. The paper defends the miners actually blaming the government in the first instance for accepting Budryk’s merger with JSW. According to NIE Budryk a state owned company was a prosperous one and JSW group recently brought only small profit with the majority of their coalmines generating losses. The paper also blames the government for not considering Budryk its problem anymore.