Polish energy minister to hold talks on Silesia mine protest
Milosz Motyka, the energy minister, has invited a delegation of a tripartite team for miners' social safety to discuss on Monday the situation in the Silesia mine in southern Poland where a group of miners has continued their underground protest since December 22.
One of the demands of the miners protesting at the mine in Czechowice-Dziedzice was a meeting with the energy minister who had earlier asked them to suspend their protest action and sit to talks after January 6. They also call for government protection measures if their mine goes bankrupt or is liquidated.
Motyka said on Sunday that the meeting would start at the seat of the Provincial Office in Katowice, southern Poland, at 11am on Monday.
Solidarity trade union leader Piotr Duda wrote on the X platform on Sunday that, despite the planned meeting, "the underground protest continues and will go on until its goal is achieved."
Meanwhile the leader of the Solidarity trade union at the Silesia mine told PAP on Sunday that, in this situation, both a solidarity picket with miners protesting against planned layoffs and the exclusion of their mine from severance protections, and a meeting of the national council of the Solidarity trade union mining section planned for Monday have been called off.
Grzegorz Babij added that he could not say whether protesting miners had been invited to the meeting.
The protesting miners demand that the new mining law, adopted in mid-December to offer cushion measures to employees of State Treasury companies, should be amended to include also the Silesia mine which, being a private company, has not been covered by the legislation.
Silesia is Poland's largest private coal mine. In 2022, it produced 2.3 percent of the country's hard coal output.
In late November, Silesia's official receiver notified the trade unions of planned mass layoffs. Under the plan, over 750 employees are to be made redundant. (PAP)
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