Open letter of the workers in the Greek Steel Industry on the occasion of the strike on January 17th, 2012 in Attica District, approved at the General Assembly on January 4th, 2012
Dear Colleagues,
We are sending warm, class-oriented greetings. 2012 can become “our own year,” the year of the labour, popular counterattack. We must not lose even a minute; it is the time of organization and action. We continue vigorously our strike that began on October 31,without being frightening of the dismissals and the blackmails of employers. We will continue until our demands are satisfied. We demand the re-hiring of the dismissed workers, we demand to work according to the hours and wages provided by our Agreements. For us there is no difference among dismissed colleagues or not, we are all redundant, according to this we struggle. .
Our struggle is supported by all the working class, the popular strata, with an unprecedented wave of active solidarity and support. It has caused the admiration of all workers and youth. Support messages arrive from all corners of Greece and from abroad. All the honest workers, even those facing the struggles with fear and distrust, or those not believing in the effectiveness of the struggles, consider our struggle as their own. They understand that a victory of the steel workers will be a victory for all workers. It will create confidence, militant environment, better conditions so that the example of Steel Industry to be followed in other workplaces too. .
Colleagues – female counterparts,
The measures taken by Manesis (the proprietor of the Steel Industry) do not concern only the Steel Industry. They are already being implemented in several workplaces, in many sectors. The goal is to generalize their implementation to all areas. There is a heavy winter in front of us and we must prepare ourselves for big, hard and longterm struggles. The black font of EU, employers and government is preparing for us a year worse than the last one. This does not and will not change with cursing and waiting, with social dialogue, or through individual efforts. We all know that.
This does not change, however, even with the struggles that we have known up to now. It requires our organising in every workplace, founding strong sectoral trade unions, with support in all workplaces, factory unions, trade unions΄ committees. It requires a change of correlations in all areas. We need to be finished with the governmental and employers΄ unionism, which is with the side of the employers, which identifies our own interests with those of the employers. But we know from experience that such a thing can not exist. It requires every struggle to be supported by all workers, like our own struggle. Without these, it is going to be hard to deal with the new governmental anti-labour measures of 2012, which are even worse than the ones Manesis tried to implement in the Steel Industry.
We call you to take the matter of the general strike on January 17 in Attica District into your own hands, a strike which the Regional Trade Union Centres in Attica were forced to decide. All workplaces in all sectors must be shut down that day. It is necessary this day to mark the start of hard struggles we must organize in 2012, with industrial workers as pioneers. In order for the new brutal measures not to be voted, for the reversal of a series of others that have been taken, in order for us to counterattack, until we get in our hands all the wealth which belongs to us. We have to show our strength, to show that we are the producers of wealth, “that without us no gear turns, we can do it without bosses.”
Colleagues ,
Through your participation in the strike you offer the best possible kind of solidarity, in our struggle, but you also help yourself. If we lose, you will lose too. If we win, you will win too, all of us will win. On January 17 you are not going to strike only for us but also for yourself, for all our class, against your own employer too, against the employers΄ class as a whole. It΄s time to rise up, we owe this to those who struggled before us, to the dead of the struggles. We owe this to our children, so that we will be able to look into their eyes with pride, telling them that we did not kneel,that we have not betrayed them. This is what we΄re trying to do all this time. We are supported by all the workers and this gives us courage,and increases our responsibility. Now it is the time together, workers, self-employed, pensioners, young people, to take a step forward with the workers at the forefront. Long live the workers΄ solidarity. The victory of the steel workers is first of all a victory of all the workers.
