Warsaw - Some 30 union members in Warsaw continued to occupy Prime Minister Donald Tusk's office Thursday after a group spent the night in the building, demanding a meeting with Tusk - who is on a foreign visit - to discuss a bill that would slash early retirement.

Members of "August 80" - a more hard-line group than the Solidarity union - said they wouldn't leave until they got a meeting.

Tusk was in Frankfurt on Wednesday for talks with the European Central Bank. On Thursday he was slated to meet French President Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris to discuss the economy crisis and energy.

Tusk offered the unionists a meeting with government officials Wednesday night. The unionists rejected the talks, and said they wanted to speak with him directly.

"We know he won't quickly leave his obligations behind," union member Krzysztof Labadz told the Polish Press Agency on Wednesday. "But he has to show up in his parliamentary office sometime."

Officials told Polish Radio that most of the unionists had brought along sleeping bags, as well as food and drink, and cleaned up after themselves without causing trouble.

The union members said they were protesting against proposed cuts in the number of people eligible for early retirement, privitizing hospitals and eliminating the Polish shipyard industry.

Former Solidarity leader Lech Walesa, however, spoke out against the unionists and said they had crossed the line.

Walesa became for many an anti-communist icon when he lead strikes in the shipyards of Gdansk that later helped topple Poland's communist regime in the 1980s.

But Walesa said if he was Prime Minister, he'd "use force" against the unionists if argument didn't work. Conflicts in a democracy had to be resolved with elections and changes in law, he said.

"When we fought, we too bent the law," Walesa told TVN24. "But that was a different situation."

The European Commission has demanded that Poland restructure the Baltic Coast shipyards where Solidarity was launched, or risk losing public aid.

The lower house of parliament approved a bill last week that would reduce the number of people eligible for early retirement from 1.2 million to 250,000. The bill must still be approved by the Senate and President Lech Kaczynski. (dpa)