Piraeus Regional Union
For work and life with rights
No sacrifice for profits and the wars of the exploiters
24-hour citywide strike on Friday, February 6
Piraeus Regional Union proclaims a 24-hour citywide strike on Friday, February 6, and calls on all unions of the private and public sector to participate and organize it.
Strike decisions have already been announced by our member unions, Union of Workers in Container Handling of Piraeus (ENEDEP), Attica Metalworkers’ Union and the Shipbuilding and Ship Repair Industry of Greece, the seafarers’ unions PEMEN and “STEFENSON”, in coordination with the 24-hour strike in the Thriassio area proclaimed by the Regional Union of Elefsina–West Attica.
We salute the International Dockworkers’ day of action under the slogan “Dockworkers do not work for war”, which will take place on February 6, in which our member union ENEDEP participates together with dockworkers from Italy, Turkey, the Basque Country, and Morocco.
The anti-worker and anti-people policy of the current government, which extends and builds upon the legislative framework of all previous governments, leaves workers exposed, without protection and safety measures, because these are considered a cost for employers. This is the reason our colleagues lost their lives at the factory in Trikala.
2025 was a record year of workplace “accidents”—employer crimes, with over 200 dead workers who never returned home. This policy has slashed our income, driven the cost of living through the roof for basic consumer goods, energy, and rents.
The latest developments with the fire at the deadly fuel tanks of CoralGas in Perama, next to homes, sports facilities, and the port, are the last straw. In an area where more than 140 fuel tanks coexist with thousands of human lives, and just a few hundred meters from the OilOne tanks in Drapetsona that spread cancer, an asphyxiating and extremely dangerous mix is being created.
The “normality” imposed on us has pushed farmers across the country, organized in the Countrywide Committee of Roadblocks, into struggle for more than 50 days, fighting for their survival. At the same time, the New Democracy government, together with the other EU and NATO parties, is dragging our people into imperialist war fronts so that business groups, shipowners, bankers, in short, capital can continue to profit, calling on us to get used to coffins.
Enough is enough! No more policies that gamble our lives for the profits of the few!
On February 6 we STRIKE because we can’t take it anymore. We will not accept living worse than in the previous century. We strike because we do not accept the insecurity and massive dangers imposed on us as ‘normality’.
The transformation of the economy into a war economy, the €800 billion collected by the EU, and the €27 billion the New Democracy government will steal from our labor and sweat through the insurance funds, with the essential agreement of the other bourgeois parties, will be used to help capital overcome the coming crisis and accelerate war preparations. They will be used for imperialist rivalries and plans in the race between USA–NATO–EU on one side and China–Russia on the other. All this has nothing to do with the “security of the peoples” they invoke. Quite the opposite!
For workers, this means even greater intensification of labor, deeper exploitation, flexible contracts, 13-hour workdays, injured workers, and people deprived of access to health care and education. Through attacks on workers’ and popular rights and intensified repression, they aim to prevent any resistance to anti-people policies.
We will not allow anyone to gamble our lives for the profits of business groups and their war! Organized, massive, militant strike struggle for our labor rights and the protection of our lives!
Here, in our area, we have our own fortress of struggle and organization, Piraeus Regional Union. We will not sit with folded arms! We are not waiting for any ‘messiah,’ old or new, to save us. We respond with even stronger organization of our struggle—through our unions, in every workplace so that no one is left alone or exposed to employer arbitrariness.
We want to live with dignity, we and our families, meeting our modern needs. We want to earn our wage without fearing whether we will return home safe and sound.
The dilemma of whether the port of Piraeus belongs to the Chinese COSCO or to American interests, or who will benefit from US plans for a port in Elefsina, is not a dilemma for workers. We do not choose whether Americans or Chinese steal our sweat, or whether we are dragged into war under private or state ownership of ports, shipyards, and critical infrastructure.
Through organized and collective action, we can take the struggle to the end, the overthrow of the policy of profit, so that ports, shipyards, and all infrastructure become bridges of cooperation and friendship between peoples, not links in imperialist rivalries.
Piraeus Regional Union calls on its member unions to take militant strike decisions against government policy which, with a carrot and a stick, seeks to drag us back to the previous century, while attempting to revive the sold-out leadership of the General Confederation of Workers of Greece (GSEE), freezing collective bargaining and collective labor agreements through a new law.
Power lies with the workers, in joint action with the self-employed, farmers, and youth. The solution lies in organized struggle, solidarity, and confrontation with employers and their state. For us to win, they must lose. We create all the wealth and it is stolen from us and we must finally enjoy the fruits of our labor, not a handful of parasites.
We demand:
- 7-hour day – 5-day week – 35-hour week
- Collective Labor Agreements with real wage increases
- Health and safety measures in workplaces
- Immediate removal of fuel tanks from residential areas in Perama and Drapetsona
- Measures against the high cost of living
- Protection of people’s homes from foreclosures
- Substantial increase in public funding and abolition of all business activity in health and education
- Reopening of the Perama Health Center and 24-hour operation of the Keratsini Health Center
- No use of the Port of Piraeus, commercial ships, or infrastructure for the transport of war and military material