FORMER president, Mr Lech Walesa, condemning the ruling ex-communists for not giving him a pension, today resumes his £165 a month electrician's job in the ailing Gdansk shipyard.
"It just cannot he that a former president has no means of support. What is he supposed to do, become a bar man or something?" Mr Walesa, who narrowly lost the presidency in November, said yesterday.
Around 6 a.m. (5 a.m. Irish time) Mr Walesa, who last Tuesday had tea with Britain's Queen Elizabeth, will report to the yard where he founded the Soviet bloc's first free trade union, Solidarity, in 1980.
Pausing to lay flowers at three vast crosses marking the 1970 shootings of local people by communist forces during food price protests, he will undergo a medical examination and safety training before resuming work later this week, a shipyard union official said.
The yard to which he returns has debts of over £76 million and the government has announced it wants to sell the enterprise.
Mr Walesa said in an interview he was returning to his old workshop mainly because the parliament dominated by his ex-Communist foes had failed to pass a proposed law giving Poland's first democratically elected president a pension.
"This shows lack of decisiveness and the malice of the excommies," he added.
Mr Walesa has hundreds of thousands of dollars of assets, but, since the election, authorities have been trying to make him pay back tax on 51 million (£637,000) he once received from a US film studio.
A Bill providing a pension for former presidents, now entitled only to a security guard and car, has been dragging in parliament.