What 'free enterprise' offers children in Poland
1992 1992-01Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 14 →
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SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1992 13 The showcase for the return to a "market economy" in Eastern Europe is supposed to be Poland. This is where capitalist restorationist policies were first initiated and where they have gone the deepest. It is where market reforms led to previously empty shops filling up with desirable goods.
The problem is that few people can afford to buy them. In fact, the sales of essential food products shrank so dramatically that Polish peasants, traditionally the most enthusiastic free marketeers, have been stirred to desperate protests.
The Polish Fourth Internationalist paper Dalej! has chronicled the disaster produced by the market reforms.
In its November 1991 issue, Dalej! took up one of the cruelest effects. At the beginning of October, Poland was visited by a delegation from the United Nations children's agency, UNICEF. The agency has to deal with the problems of starvation of masses of children in the so-called Third World. The problems in Poland are, of course, not so severe, but they were enough to arouse the agency's concem.
Children have begun to go hungry in Poland. "All the statistics show that despite easy access to citrus fruits [one of the worst shortages under the old Stalinist economy], the diet of the average Pole has become poorer since the introduction of the Balcerowicz [austerity] plan. Here the children are the biggest losers...
"It is well known that there has been a dramatic drop in the consumption of milk. But more and more children are not only going without specific foods but without food in general. According to national studies, about 40 percent of pupils do not bring lunches, and between 10 and 20 percent eat either breakfast or lunch. In those regions where the recession is worse, the percentage must be higher."
The health of children is being threatened also by the disappearance of healthcare.
Dalej! continued: "You only have to think of the wild plans for privatizing children's hospitals to realize how much the health of the youngest generation is going to depend on the money their parents have. Equal access for all children to appropriate, free healthcare today is only a dream." Street peddler in Warsaw: "There is no future for us."
Even free elementary and high-school education is already a thing of the past in Poland. "The catastrophic situation of the schools," Dalej! pointed out, "is no secret any more. The drastic cuts in funds for education have led to cutting the weekly hours of instruction, the elimination of after-school activities, layoffs of school workers, a reduction in the number of teachers, delay of repairs, etc. Many schools used up their yearly budgets before the summer vacation and are months behind in paying their electric bills...
"Of course, there is a difference between the public schools and the "social schools,' where the children of the Polish elite go. But let us remember that even in the state schools, the press has revealed that a place in first grade cost 1.5 million zlotys this year [slightly more than an average monthly wage]. The result of the state policy is thus a silent, progressive privatization of all education.
"The schools are bankrupt for all practical purposes, with the result that the parents have to pay. They have to pay, depending on the school, from 50,000 to 200,000 zlotys a month. Without this money, the schools would have to close their doors. The situation is the same for kindergartens.
"More and more state kindergartens are being liquidated. They have been turned over to the municipalities, which in many cases cannot maintain them, especially in those regions (especially hard hit by unemployment) where the parents cannot contribute. In Lodz, for example, from May to August, the percentage of children in preschool institutions dropped from 55 percent to 34 percent."
The most insidious effect of the de facto privatization of education, Dalej! pointed out, was that it is rapidly widening the gap in the opportunities for the children of the poor and of the well-to-do, eliminating the social mobilility that was one of the main attractions of the former system.