Document of the National Meeting of PAME March 16

Colleagues,

We are here today, trade unionists from all over the country, representatives of Federations, Regional Trade Union Centres, base trade unions, not only to evaluate the huge strike on 28 February and the rallies that followed, but also to discuss, exchange opinions and experience on how to organise the new big battles ahead of us, the strike on 9 April and May Day.

Most importantly, to discuss in order to further strengthen the effort that has been distinctly reinforced in recent years so that the workers’ movement can take the leading role against the anti-people’s policy of the government and the bourgeois parties. To strengthen and deepen within the workers the faith and conviction that this ugly situation they live in can be overturned, that this rotten capitalist state is hostile and unjust and cannot be restored. To strengthen even more resolutely the effort of the workers, together with the youth, the popular strata of the town and village to build their own social alliance that will take decisive action against their common enemies, the business groups, the state and the governments that serve them, the imperialist hawks of the EU and NATO.

Focusing on the workplace, to spark the debate with workers. Talk widely under the slogan “their profits or our lives”, a slogan that has marked the mobilisations of the last 2 years. It highlighted the basic dilemma that every worker must bring to the centre of his  attention. The hundreds of trade unions that have been at the forefront of the struggles for two years, choosing life, a better tomorrow for ourselves and our children.

We are preparing the next strike battles on April 9 and May Day, with General Assemblies, rallies, meetings. Let every trade union get out its materials, work well on its demands, ensure conditions for broad propaganda of the struggles ahead, with initiative and determination to take all the necessary measures to get the workers to participate en masse in the strikes and strike rallies.

The success of the strike on 9 April has its own demands against the government and the employers who will rage to suppress it. Against the opposition parties and their cadres in the movement, in the GSEE, in the ADEDY,-ETUC affiliates in Greece- in the big Regional Unions and Federations who will seek to undermine it, to bring it into line with the system. They will seek to come out of the shadows and disgrace in order to spread the poison of social partnership and subjugation, to cut down everything radical that is born within the ranks of the struggle.

The strike on 9 April is not “another battle”, it is not just a battle for contracts and wages as the GSEE representatives claim, seeking vulgarly to erase what has happened in recent weeks. It is the continuation of a workers’ trade union movement that does not settle for crumbs, that does not get trapped in parliamentary illusions, that does not become complacent in the logic of the lesser evil.

We will not bow to the sirens demanding that workers leave the streets of struggle. We know well that the great battles we fought have cornered the government, brought to the fore the trial that was about to be buried, cancelled the cover-up plan.

We will not stop until criminal and political accountability is met, no matter how high up some people are, even for the Prime Minister of the country. We will not stop unless we prevent this new crime of cover-up. The cover-up not only of those responsible but also of the real causes that led to the crime in Tempe that cost the lives of 57 innocent souls, so that we do not mourn any more new Tempe.

We will be back on the streets on the strike on 9 April. Thousands of strikers across the country, housands on the streets as in the enormous strike rallies on 28 February. Like the millions of strikers and demonstrators who in one week flooded the streets three times across the country, who picked up the thread from the magnificent rallies of 26 January and the successful strike battle on 20 November, they illuminated what is the only way to the real vindication of the workers and the people. What is the only way to be able to breathe, claiming our right against the criminal policy that fills our everyday life with “Tempe”. And this is the road we are determined to walk to the end!

We are working actively so that the strike on 9 April will be a continuation of the strike of 28 February, which was a historic strike battle that was truly fought against gods and demons. Against the government of the ND, with its parrots in the media aligned. They sought to undermine the mobilisations, talking about “national mourning”, tried to keep the workers and the people grounded in their homes, scaremongering about provocations and “destabilisation”. When all this failed, they used the familiar visible and invisible mechanisms of repression, chemicals and water cannons.

In the big battles to come, we will have against usthe parties of capital, PASOK, SYRIZA and their various “wings”. But also the compromised leaderships of ND, PASOK and SYRIZA in the GSEE and ADEDY, who, after failing to prevent the strike on 28 February, attempted to distort its content and turn the strike mobilizations and rallies into a “memorial”! The GSEE even rejected the request to bring forward the strike announced for 9 April to immediately continue the great struggles that preceded it.

Against us we will once again have the multifaceted mechanisms of the employers who saw the strike wave on February 28th flaring up and sought sometimes with the whip and sometimes with the carrot to put obstacles, to manipulate the workers to the basic conclusion that more and more people are realizing, that it is profit that bleeds our lives. In every way they have claimed that profit is not to blame for the crime of Tempe, that profit is not to blame for workplaces being turned into arenas of death, 300 dead in two years, just in the last two days we have counted three dead colleagues. That it is not the fault of profit that our lives have been turned into a “vast valley of the Tempe”! What if just yesterday we heard the prosecutor of the trial of the crime in Mati -wildfire in the suburbs of Athens in 2018- say that 104 people were burned to death because the then SYRIZA government prioritized saving a large refinery over saving dozens of human lives.

We have a lot of work to do. We’ll put the glasses on them again! Through the decisive action of PAME and the hundreds of trade unions that will once again bear the burden of the strike’s success. As in the general strike on 28 February when workplaces were dead, ships were tied up in the ports, small shops were shut down, schools and colleges were closed, hundreds of thousands of young and older workers took the floor for the first time and declared to the employer that “today I am on strike”. They participated en masse under the banners of their unions, picketing the rallies. They shouted the slogan “Their profits or our lives” which sealed the huge mobilizations.

This motto illuminates how we should go on. Because the “next day” is already here. And now we need workers even more resolutely to continue our organized struggle against the brutality of the system, the brutality that has no cure. Because the bourgeois state, this unjust, hostile state, is selectively incapable of protecting our lives, precisely because it is capable of shielding the profits of the business groups. Able to involve us in wars by constantly demanding new sacrifices from our people, crushing human life in other countries, filling the map of the world with new flows of human refugees

The crime in Tempe was the tip of the iceberg, the last straw. But “oxygen” is missing from all aspects of our lives!

– With the inflation that torments the people’s families, the stagnating wages, the energy poverty, the taxing of the people, in order to ensure the profitability of the banks, the energy groups, the supermarkets, big capital.

– With the tragic situation in the severely understaffed public hospitals, with the unmaintained infrastructure

– With the situation in the schools, where not even the most basic anti-seismic checks are being carried out, ceilings are falling, the shortage of teachers is enormous. And on the other hand, they are making schools even more classist – as with the law on Onassis Schools for the few, passed by the government together with PASOK and the supposedly anti-systemic Konstantopoulou, against the students and parents who rose up. With the private universities that PASOK also agrees with, and they create two levels in the education of our children, depending on the pocket of the parents.

– With the infrastructures – a disaster, the non-existent protection of the people from natural phenomena, with tragedies following one another: at Mati, Mandra, Thessaly, the fires in Attica, Evia, Rhodes, etc.

– With the labour jungle that all governments have created so far, in order to satisfy the business groups. Along with PASOK, the ND government passed just a few days ago an amendment that reduces insurance contributions for overtime, nights and holidays, making labour even cheaper for employers and legalising tax evasion.

– With the rents on fire, and the massive evictions, throwing out on the street of wage earners, the elderly, the disabled to “sanitize” the banking system.

The “liberalised” railway is not a death trap for the people just because it sacrifices safety for the profits of business groups, as Tempi has shown. An equally chilling audio document has seen the light of day between two OSE-Greek Railways- station masters who refer, among other things, to the multitude of trains loaded with NATO war material, for which there is no information, saying that “NATO trains don’t stop”!  US-NATO trains pass through populated areas, carrying ammunition constantly through towns and villages, without any protection and security measures, literally behind the backs of the people, as can be seen from the most recent cases in Tyrnavos, Lavrio and Piraeus, with trucks loaded with tons of ammunition and TNT for Ukraine and bullets for Israel, putting thousands of lives at risk.

The transformation of the country into a vast American-NATO base, the increasingly active involvement, the Prime Minister’s commitment to increase spending on NATO to more than 3% of GDP poses enormous risks for all the people!

This is the “normalcy” of this state whose only aim and purpose is to shield the profits of a handful of parasites.

These are the “principles” of the European Union, which is being stoked from morning till night by the government and the other bourgeois parties. As PASOK-SYRIZA-Constantopoulou shamelessly did through their recent motion of no confidence in the Parliament.

They glorify, wherever they stand and wherever they are, the European Union of corrupt lobbies, of inflation, of energy poverty, of the abolition of labour rights, of the “algorithm” for the minimum wage, of work to the grave, of the commercialisation and privatisation of Health and Education, but support the genocide of the Palestinian people by the murdering state of Israel, the repression of the uprooted, FRONTEX, Pylos and Melilla, the terror laws and preventive surveillance, the European Union, which a few days ago decided to give an additional 800 billion to turn to the war economy and to continue the war in Ukraine.

The everyday life we are living is not due to the ‘absence of the rule of law’, but precisely to the presence of the bourgeois state, which is hostile to the people, which makes unjust law for the many, because it is made to serve the interests of the few, the capitalists. And this state, is not going to bethe “state of justice for the many”.

Their class justice confirms this. With the government-appointed leadership, which judges on the basis of the unjust laws that governments and bourgeois parties pass. With the wretched and unacceptable Article 86 of the Constitution and the law on the responsibility of ministers, which leaves political officials unpunished.

And while they are incapable of protecting the people where they really need it, they prove themselves most capable of repressing the popular movement! That is why, on the one hand, they easily file away the responsibility of the police for the murder of a young man and 105 Croatian hooligans -murder of a young fan in Athens by fascist hooligands from Croatia- are free and clear in their homes, and on the other hand, they sought to break up the magnificent rallies for the Tempi.

Together they all talk about ‘restoring institutions’, ‘returning to European normality’, ‘reopening the rule of law’. This is the so-called way out that they are serving us, with the sole aim of ‘corraling’ the people, of countering the emancipationist current that has become more and more distinct in the ranks of the workers in recent years, fuelled by the great mobilisations of the last few days.

Colleagues,

No trust! No tolerance for those who are destroying our lives, for those who have passed and implemented hundreds of anti-worker laws.

Whichever way they serve up the so-called new state, we can be sure of one thing: that it will be even more selectively “effective” for the profits of the industrialists and bankers, even more reactive and aggressive for the interests of the workers. The prime minister has come to say that the big strike rallies were not even close to saying that they were demanding the evaluation! Is it really the evaluation that was missing and led to the crime in Tempe? OSE, Hellenic Train were ‘evaluated’ companies, implementing ‘evaluation’ systems based on European criteria, while at the same time they did not train their staff and operated with tragic understaffing and without the necessary equipment.

It is no coincidence that when the Prime Minister was speaking in Parliament about the evaluation, the prosecutions and “penalties” started, e.g. to teachers who were fighting for public, free and modern Education, a few days before militant trade unionists were dragged to court. We support the nationwide mobilization of teachers against intimidation and repression, against anti-educational evaluation.

The solution today is not for political developments to act as a “release valve” for popular anger, setting the bar for a change of government or a change of face of the prime minister, so that the same criminal policy can continue uninterrupted with another government or other persons.

The solution is not to try to restore the rotten and corrupt political system, where every business, whether state-owned or private, even the state monopoly, has only one choice: To operate for profit, squeezing the workers, bleeding the people, wasting the people, cutting corners on security measures and infrastructure.

We are not fighting for “the political system to breathe again” as the PASOK president claims. We are fighting for us to breathe! Because we know well that behind every crime against the working class and the people are the same culprits and the same causes: Capital, its state, and profit.

By participating in the life of the trade unions, changing the correlations everywhere, against the forces of the system. To take this struggle nationwide and coordinated characteristics, uniting the movements of the workers and other social-people’s forces with each other in the common goal of overthrowing this policy.

We support every mobilisation for health, education, against the auctions and evictions, the mobilisations of pensioners, against the privatisation of water. We welcome the recent struggle victories of the construction workers, the workers of DELTA and the workers of E- FOOD. They are victories that secure rights, give big increases in wages, guarantee the 8-hour – 5-day – 35-hour working day, abolish unpaid overtime and the regulation of working hours, and restore three-year seniority contracts through collective agreements. In these struggles lies the perspective, such a movement that fights the anti-worker laws in practice illuminates the way out for the people.

This is why it is a crucial issue to grow the rallying around a demanding framework that challenges the root cause of our suffering, profit, and promotes the satisfaction of our contemporary needs.

We strengthen the struggle:

For political and criminal responsibility to be attributed to all those responsible for the crime in Tempe, no matter how high up they are, and to be punished in an exemplary manner. That there be no cover-up.

To oppose the liberalisation and privatisation policy of the EU and the governments of ND, PASOK and SYRIZA. To be able to have modern, safe, regular, cheap, exclusively public rail and urban transport services, without any entrepreneurial activity, with staff covering all needs, with stable work and with guaranteed labour and social security rights.

To prevent the unthinkable plans for the further commercialisation of water from going through. For water to be a social and exclusively public good and not a commodity

For Health and Safety measures in all workplaces. To bring the Labour Inspectorate back under the responsibility of the state, with increased funding, mass recruitment, strengthening infrastructure and means.

To repeal all anti-worker laws on the minimum wage, collective agreements and unpaid overtime. For collective bargaining and wage increases, for 7-hour, 5-day, 35-hour work. Restoration of the 13th-14th wage in the public sector, restoration of the 13th-14th pension.

For measures against inflation. Abolition of VAT and all indirect taxes on consumer goods, fuel, water and energy. For a tax-free 12000 euros, plus 3,000 euros for each child. For the abolition of the ENFIA for working and popular households.

Against auctions and evictions. For the legislative safeguarding of the 1st residence and cancellation of debts for workers and people’s households.

For decisive strengthening of state funding in health, education, welfare, social policy services of municipalities, for protection from natural disasters, mass recruitment of permanent staff in all these critical sectors.

To strengthen the struggle for the protection of human life, against the war armaments and war expenditures that require new sacrifices of our people, to strengthen the business groups of the war economy. Greece out of the slaughterhouses of war. Shut down the bases of death.

To strengthen the struggle against state and employer repression, for the protection of trade union action and the right to strike.