Warsaw, 8 November 1996 (RFE/RL) -- Polish reports today say Labor Minister Andrzej Baczkowski apparently died of a heart attack yesterday at age 41.
A government spokeswoman today told our Warsaw correspondent that Baczkowski went home early from work yesterday, complaining of feeling tired and ill.
Baczkowski was named Labor Minister in February, and had just completed what reports say was a difficult, exhausting restructuring of the Ministry.
Baczkowski was a veteran of the pre-1989 Solidarity movement.
Baczkowski, an academic specializing in labor law, advised Solidarity after it emerged as the Soviet bloc's first free trade union in 1980, and was interned when State and Party leader Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law to crush the union in 1981.
He took a top post in the Labour and Social Policy Ministry after the 1989 fall of communism, and was appointed a non-party minister of the current leftist Government.