WFTU International Trade Union Action Day for Peace
With the strength of our struggles We escalate the fight and put our needs on the front line For peace of the peoples
(Extracts from the main intervention of PAME in the Union Meeting in Thessaloniki, September 1st, )
Dear colleagues,
our meeting today fills us with optimism and courage. Because it is a continuation of June 2022. When more than 500 unions, Regional Trade Union Centres and Federations, more than 2000 trade unionists from all over Greece, gathered at the National Congress of PAME in Piraeus. There where, workers from every sector, from every workplace discussed, exchanged experience, and with their decisions they sent the message: In organisation our strength, in the struggle lies hope, our weapon is solidarity!
We are proud because with us today are again dozens of unions. We are proud to be united in our solidarity. Among us are unions that have been discussed in every workplace throughout the past period, have been an example of militancy, have given important experience to the struggles of the working class.
Such unions as of MALAMATINA. Of the construction workers who after a long struggle signed a collective agreement with more than 20% wage increases and are fighting for its implementation. The workers of Kavala Fertilizers who, after the recent court ruling that vindicates them, come to the following conclusion: that the workers can cancel in practice the anti-workers plans as long as their unions organize themselves even more effectively.
The Kavala Oil workers, who with their union continue the struggle against the dismissals. Varvaressos, where the workers do not give up, they demand what they have worked for and for this reason they strengthened their union in the recent Union elections. The train workers of OSE where the workers refused to transport war material to Ukraine, expressing in the best way class internationalist solidarity.
We are also very proud to have with us in our meeting today from neighbouring Turkey, our comrade Ali Riza Kucukosmanoglu, President of NAKLIYAT Is and member of the presidential council of the WFTU. His presence here today shows that the workers have nothing to divide between them, but much to unite them. They are united by the fact that they produce all the wealth, they are united by the anxiety for their future, they are united by the fact that they have the power to change things.
From here we send the message for The International Day Of Trade Union Action For Peace that the WFTU is organising today all over the world. For today is the black anniversary of the beginning of the World War II with the attack of Nazi Germany on Poland, a war that “for the masters” plunged millions of workers and their families into pain, death and misery.
That is why it is crucial for the trade unions to come forward to fight and demand:
No more workers’ blood for the competitions of the monopolies.
Stop the imperialists’ embargoes and sanctions.
We fight for peace of the peoples.
Disengagement from NATO-EU.
The rally we prepare for September 10 in Thessaloniki during the TIF-HELEXPO is crucial for the continuation and escalation of our struggles.
Many talk about the winter that is coming for the people. The problems are well known with starvation wages, the flexible working relations, and price hikes with inflation above 11%. With the taxing of the people hitting “red” as the state takes from us 95% of the total taxes to give them to the monopoly groups and return to us some crumbs.
The Energy poverty with price increases and record gas prices. The very expensive rents with students searching for a house and popular families facing foreclosures and evictions.
The pandemic and the shortages in hospitals, like in the local hospital that had no water for 2 days. The new school year that the people’s family will pay gold for tutorials and all this in unprotected schools where the government does not take any protection measures for Covid.
All of this at a time when money is flowing for our country’s deeper involvement in the war in Ukraine. 6.5 billion in 2021 alone for NATO spending which of course has nothing to do with the security of the people. For warplanes and frigates, for NATO they give billions every year, while for the people they are closing hospitals and schools, cutting salaries and pensions.
By giving away infrastructures such as the port of Thessaloniki and the Third Army Corps, they are also turning our city, like the whole country, into a possible target for reprisals in conditions of generalised war.
For some, of course, winter is summer. 133 out of 145 listed companies in the Stock market, they increased their turnover by 25%. In energy, ELPE had a 63% increase in sales, reaching 1.7 billion euros in one quarter. Motor oil increased its turnover by 73% in the same period. Large metal factories that almost increased their turnover by 40%, construction groups with a big increase in their profitability and the list goes on and on. Not everyone is losing and not everyone is having a hard time. There are guilty people for what we are living.
There are culprits for energy poverty:
The policy of “green” capitalist development is the reason why the people are sinking deeper and deeper into greater energy poverty. This policy has been implemented by all those who have governed. They have alternately promoted the ‘liberalisation’ of energy, the Energy Stock Exchange, and de-fossilisation, favouring very expensive renewable energy sources so that business groups can find new areas of profitability.
There are culprits for the starvation wages:
Together all governments (PASOK, ND, SYRIZA etc) have had a hand in ensuring that the minimum wage is decided by the government and not as a result of collective bargaining. And all of this is based on “productivity”, “competitiveness” and the overall state of the economy. Three governments have changed since 2011 and the average gross wage from 1409 euros has crashed to 1072 euros. Together they maintained and extended the whole anti-labour framework that leaves almost 90% of workers outside any collective bargaining agreement. Together they have abolished fixed working time. Like the Hatzidakis law of the ND Government, which destroyed completely the working time arrangement. Or for Sunday work, which SYRIZA imposed for 32 Sundays a year in a number of regions and today, ND ministers say that the issue has been adequately regulated by the previous government.
There are culprits for our country turning into a “cheap shooting range”:
All together ND, SYRIZA, DIEM25 and PASOK were applauding in Parliament the Nazi criminals of the Azov battalion. Together they consented to our country’s involvement in the war despite any asterisks. Together they present the geostrategic upgrading of the country as a goal of prosperity for the working people as well.
No one should believe the governments’ lies that NATO spending is for the security of the country. The proof is that the wind in the sails of Turkish bourgeoisie provocativeness is first and foremost given by NATO itself, NATO that does not recognize national borders and that recognizes Turkey as a key player in the region and a strategic partner.
Now is the time for workers united to reject disorienting dilemmas, not to waste any more precious time.
Over the years at the TIF-HELEXPO we have heard a lot. In 2019 the Prime Minister was talking here in Thessaloniki about “Growth for All”. In 2021, the leader of the opposition, Tsipras was talking about ” the abolition of the Hatzidakis law” but in in Parliament voted in favor of half of the articles.
Now we will hear more big words, also because of the election period. Like the New Democracy’s celebrations about the end of post-memorandum supervision. After all, we experienced the same “celebrations” in 2018 under the Syriza government, when “we came out of the memoranda” and “the country was returning to normality”. Of course, we are living this “normality” in our own skin.
We will hear a lot from these parties and the leadership of the GSEE (the members of ETUC in Greece) to support capitalist growth so that together employers and workers can live better together, as they say.
But this is the road that the workers in the mines of Halkidiki are experiencing. On the one hand the metal prices are recording historic record profits (gold reached 60 thousand dollars a kilo) on the other hand the miners are experiencing the intensification of their work, the reduction of their income with the 2% increase in their salary which is not even enough for a joke, while the contract workers in the project are working without Collective Contract.
This is “growth for all” in the tourism industry. Record profits based on generous government support for big hotels to make renovations, mergers, acquisitions. With money like in 2021 when more than 800 million euros were given to the “long-suffering” big hotel operators.
For this development they are selling off important infrastructure such as the Elefsina shipyards recently. Their reorganisation provides for the familiar recipe: redundancies, reforms in labour relations, cancellation of debts for the employers and privileges so that the poor investor can make profit. Such is the disagreement between the ND and Syriza that yesterday, hand in hand, they jointly voted for this bill.
This is what their development requires. Cheaper workers to enrich the few. That is why there can be no delay in organizing our struggle. Because our lives do not fit into crumbs like the ones the prime minister comes to give based on the “strength of the economy”, which means based on the capitalists not losing a euro of their profits.
The rumoured increase in the minimum wage to 751€ from 2023, what does it mean in practice? It means bringing the wage back to 2010 levels while prices on everything have skyrocketed.
Similarly, the so-called housing program for young couples is in essence a subsidy to construction groups. No expectation that a change of government in this context will provide a solution to our problems.
We have tried all sorts: one party, centre-right, centre-left, so-called left-wing, national unity, two- and three-party, technocrats. The results are well known. Then we were told we were in crisis. Now the song is changing, saying that we have exceptional circumstances. All this to put our claims on ice. Every time the people bet on the lesser of two evils, the results were tragic. Disappointment, fatalism, inaction.
No hope from bankrupt forces in the labour movement such as the leaderships in the GSEE and ADEDY, the members of ETUC in Greece. The president of the GSEE was talking last year in front of the TIF about an annual memorial and activism. In previous years they did not even hold a rally, with the excuse of the pandemic. Are they now going to organize the struggle? They are steadily cultivating compromise and the undermining of working people’s struggles, cultivating illusions that they can negotiate as equals with the industrialists.
Workers should put them aside, as they have been doing even more systematically since January 2017 when 9 National, all-workers strikes have taken place without the participation of the GSEE leadership.
Now is the time to put our demands and our needs in the front line. This is the new and hopeful. Workers have gained experience in the last year that proves that when they do not give up, when they organize, when they become one fist, when they demand from the employers, then hope is born, they get breathing space, they gain time, so that from a better position they can fight negative developments and pave the way to live as they should in the 21st century.
The workers in Fertilizers of Kavala, in COSCO, in construction, in LARCO, in EFOOD, in MALAMATINA, in tourism and catering like in Santorini where they signed a collective agreement what they had in common:
– They didn’t sit on their hands, they didn’t accept the dismissals, the unpaid work, the worsening of their living conditions.
– They did not wait for a “saviour” to solve their problems but believed in the power of the workers, in the organisation in the unions, in solidarity.
– They did not hold a wait-and-see attitude to developments, they did not postpone their struggle waiting for governmental changes but immediately, without wasting time, they organized their struggle for their rights.
– They did not bow their heads on what is legal and what is not, but with their action they threw in the trash all anti-labour laws and plans such as the attack against trade union and labour rights, the regulation of working hours.
To face what is coming, to put a brake on the difficult winter they are preparing for us, to make the winter of those who are ruining our lives unbearable, to be able to breathe, for the working class to go on the counter-offensive, now – today is needed:
- A workers’ trade union movement that fights against the exploitation of man by man. That demands modern working conditions, with fixed daily working hours, with increases in wages and pensions, with an extension of social benefits, with a reduction of working time, paid overtimes. Because we produce all the wealth. Because without the workers, the gears don’t turn.
- With trade unions that unite workers, defend living processes with the active participation of workers. Unions open and democratic, an attraction for young workers.
- A movement that fights back, not of defeatism and compromise. Trade unions independent of the clutches of employers and their governments, with an open front against them, away from bureaucracy.
- A movement that takes the struggle one step further, putting forward comprehensive demands that meet the modern needs of the people and the possibilities that exist based on science and technology.
- A movement that will stand alongside the poor and oppressed, with genuine internationalist solidarity, against the imperialist wars.
This is what the employers, their state and governments fear. The images from many countries like recently in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, the USA with the big strikes show how indignation boils. These struggles are something promising. They show that the working class has not said its last word and that the people will write their own history, their own developments.
This they know. That is why they put additional obstacles to the organisation and struggles of the working class. That is why they have set up a dense network of surveillance with the backs of all the governments and the EU in order to catch up as much as they can with the popular river. That is why they are targeting the action of the trade unions. The people’s freedoms can only be defended by the trade unions as the big mobilisations of PAME in May Day 2020 and in the Polytechnic that the government under the pretext of the pandemic wanted to prevent. They failed then and they will fail again
We call all unions, trade unionists and workers to strengthen the militant struggle for increases in wages and pensions above the level of inflation, to meet all our modern needs. For big price cuts in basic goods, electricity, heating and fuel. Cancellation of debts, no working people’s house without electricity, water, telephone and food.
– Because today we cannot watch with neutrality the war slaughterhouses that are growing in Ukraine, nor can we take sides with one or another imperialist thieve in the plundering of the peoples’ wealth.
– Because we cannot accept as a fait accompli the criminalisation of trade union action and strikes, we cannot watch the anti-labour reversals succeed one another, we cannot watch workers’ rights shrink.
– Because it is necessary today to strengthen the struggle in the workplaces, in the sectors, to strengthen the counter-attack of the workers’ trade union movement, to root the organised workers’ response everywhere!
In the face of the problems that we have and that are growing, in the effort that they are making to show that nothing is changing, in the climate of inaction that they are cultivating, we say:
There is a solution. Organisation – struggle – counter-attack. PAME is organising new, more massive and militant struggles and that is why it is a thorn in the side of employers and governments.
We call on all trade unions to intensify the resistance everywhere in order to escalate our struggle with a strike response in October.
Because this is the only way to secure our rights. Because without us nothing moves and we have the power to overturn this situation. All together in the big rally of September 10!
