All In The Strike Mobilizations
Workers, unemployed, young workers,
May 1st is strike, day of the world working class, inspection of our forces and a springboard of new struggles. We honor our dead, Chicago in 1886, the cigarette workers of May 36, the two hundreds of Kessariani of the 1st May 44. We honor all those who gave their lives to have rights at work and in life, with salaries that meet our needs, fixed daily time work, leisure, social security, to live in a world without exploitation, in a world without wars, refugees.
1rst May 2018 finds us in the face of complex developments.
After 9 years of capitalist crisis, in which we fought to save them, monopolies, government staff are preparing for the phase of capitalism development that will be as painful for the working people.
The SYRIZA-ANEL government talks about leaving the memorandums and speechifies about “fair development”. They are about to vote on the 88 prerequisites of the 4th evaluation and they are preparing the next memorandum to be pitched from August as the “National Strategic Plan”. A project that has the agreement of the parties which serve the capital.
No worker should have delusions about who will be the beneficiary of such a development! This will be based on the debris of our rights, in cultivating low claims on the one hand and fake hopes on the other,-which the government will generously distribute.
Only the organized class struggle can create the conditions for work and life with rights based on our era and our needs.
The way is now shown by the unions, the federations, the workers’ centers, the dynamic trade unionists rallying in PAME and organizing the fight for everything that concerns workers and their families.
They are struggling for sectoral contracts with rights and increases in wages, pensions, against the auctions, for the health and education of the children of the people. They are present in all small and big struggles.
At the same time, the majority of the GSEE continues its undermining role supporting the government to pass the measures of the third assessment, even limiting the right to strike! A few days ago, GSEE serving the big business ran in secretly, to sign for another year wages without raise, legalizing the shameful separation to a salary of 586 euros and 511 for under 25 years old. Their intention was not to hinder the upcoming growth!
It is now imperative to regroup the labor union movement, the change in the correlation of forces. It is necessary to massify the trade unions with the new shift in the working class, to break the abscess of the Government Employers’ Union!
The SYRIZA -ANEL government has arrived to the point to select the 1st May for the liberalization of auctions and seizures for debts in banks and in public even for 500 euros! They throw the crows of banks on the people, preparing 130,000 auctions! It is a duty towards workers, in the history of the labor movement, trade unions to get in front and to make the slogan “no house in the hands of a banker” come true!
Colleagues, workers, unemployed, young men and women,
The government serves the aspirations of business groups, capitalist enterprises, with its anti-worker, anti-people policy. At the same time it promotes their interests in the wider Mediterranean region as well, taking active part in the dangerous imperialist plans of NATO and the EU, participating in NATO-led war against other peoples, aiming at the so-called “geostrategic upgrading of Greece”.
The barbaric policy that crashes workers is the other face of the same coin with the country’s involvement in NATO interventions, rendering Greece, from Evros to Crete, a base of NATO, a vast field of fire!
The SYRIZA – ANEL government is becoming more and more involved in the monopoly struggle for the sharing of energy sources and their transport routes. They have tremendous responsibilities as they have turned out to be the largest washing machine in US imperialism! They not only maintain and upgrade the base of Souda, but in just two years, they filled Greece with American bases in Alexandroupolis, Araxos, Andravida, Aktio, Larissa, Syros! They will not hesitate to engage our people in dangerous war plans for the interests of the imperialists. People need to be vigilant. We have nothing to share with the neighboring peoples, the Turkish people, the peoples of the Balkans.
At the same time, the war continues to escalate in Syria for the seventh year, where the imperialist forces are fighting for the control of the sources of wealth with the people of Syria being in the whirlpool of barbarism.
Refugees in Turkey and the Aegean islands are trying to find a way out of Europe. Many refugees have drowned in the Aegean Sea. The entire Eastern Mediterranean has become a field of war preparations, resulting from the extraction of monopoly resources by wealthy sources. The murderous state of Israel continues the massacre of civilians. Turkey entered Africa and threatened the Aegean, while the Greek government reassures the people.
In these circumstances, the working class of our country, the world working class honors the 1st of May, raising a wall of resistance to the imperialist war, a wave of solidarity with refugees and immigrants, isolating the nationalist fascists in each country.
The greatest way to honor the struggles, the sacrifices of our comrades who fell into the unremitting class struggle for their rights, for social liberation, for the abolition of exploitation, against the imperialist war, is the continuation of the class struggle, in the same engraved way to final victory of the peoples.
We struggle for mass trade unions, we go into the counter-attack! We demand here and now the disengagement of the Greek government from NATO’s imperialist plans and interventions. Greece out of NATO and the EU.
No change of borders and the conditions that guarantee them.
The bases of death must close. Greek ships, airplanes, military missions abroad return now!
We demand that NATO leave the Aegean now, no money spent on NATO equipment.
We isolate nationalism and the criminals of the Golden Dawn Nazi murderers from every workplace, from every neighborhood.
We won’t become slaves for our bosses’ profits!
We require pay rises. No worker without Collective Contract, No one under minimum wage, no worker without insurance, health and safety measures at work.
Employment in education and healthcare services now. Give money for education and healthcare not for NATO SLAUGHTER!
The fiery slogan born in great struggles and uprisings leads us today more than ever:
Proletarians of all countries unite!
Long live May 1st!
Long live the world working class!
