With a huge demonstration in front of the Parliament the class unions and the people of Athens welcomed the militant farmers, who fight for their survival.
Farmers driving for 2 days hundreds of kilometers arrived in Athens receiving an amazing welcome in every step of their journey.
Thousands of workers, students and associations formed a huge march that accompanied the farmers to the center of Athens, in front of the Parliament where the whole area flooded with their demands and the message of solidarity to their struggle.
Upon their arrival, the Union of Hotel-Tourism of Athens welcomed them with warm food, the students with red flowers and the people with the slogan “WORKERS-FARMERS United, One Voice-One Fist”.
On behalf of PAME, Yannis Tasioulas, president of the Federation of Construction Workers spoke to the rally saying:
“We are on your side. Your struggle is our struggle. The worker next to the farmer, the farmer next to the worker, because we have common interests. Because it is on our back that the consequences of the anti-labour policy, the anti-farmers’ policy of the CAP and the EU fall. Because we face the same problems that are born and aggravated by the same causes. For us and our needs there are budgetary constraints. For the few and the big interests there is freedom to step over our lives for their profits.
Workers and farmers have built strong bonds of solidarity in difficult times. In autumn we were together saving houses, farms destroyed by the storms which were and are left unprotected by a policy that sees our own lives as a cost, a pointless expense, to protect them with necessary infrastructure and measures. With your hands and ours muddied, we have seen in your eyes the anxiety for our children’s tomorrow. The same earlier in the rubble of the forest fires.
We feel the same anger because we find that we workers, like you, have one of the same. First the construction workers were unemployed, underpaid, with the boogeyman of the crisis and we were looking for ways to make ends meet. Now, we’re working unending hours, and the paycheck isn’t even enough to survive. It becomes smoke before we go to the supermarket, when the utility bill comes, in the heating of our families.
Hope lies in struggle, in demand, in solidarity. That is where the great power we have is confirmed in practice. We call workers and farmers to stand side by side with the struggle, strike rallies, demonstrations, and protests on the National Strike that we have before us on February 28.”
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