Dear colleagues,

Our Union, which represents thousands of workers from the tourism, food service, and hotel sectors in Attica and is affiliated with PAME, sends a warm and militant greeting to the strike and struggle being waged by the workers at the Radisson Blu Canary Wharf and the Draughts Bar.

Your demands for decent working conditions, a collective agreement with wage increases, permanent and stable employment, and more, are more than fair and just: they are necessary and urgent for the lives of the workers.

We want to tell you that here in Greece as well, due to the policies consistently implemented by all governments over time, we face enormous problems that do not allow us to live as we deserve, in accordance with our needs. For example, according to recent data:

• Hotel workers earn wages only slightly higher than those of 2011, while tourist arrivals have nearly tripled since then, reaching 38 million from 14 million!
• During the tourist season, they work non-stop without a day off, 9 or 10 hours a day—conditions imposed by the employers and incorporated into the sectoral collective agreement in collusion with their trade unionists.
• One worker now ends up doing the work of three, without health and safety measures. Employers claim they cannot find staff, yet at the same time they continue building hotels, adding floors and rooms, squeezing the remaining workers dry.
• Every year in the sector, along with profits, different forms of flexibility also “multiply,” so that today we count workers of 14 different “speeds.”
• Those who work “seasonally” must make do in the winter with the crumbs provided for three months by the “unemployment fund.”

In Greece as well, workplaces have literally turned into minefields of injuries and deaths for workers, due to the responsibility of employers and the government, who treat our safety and health as a cost! Every day we mourn dead colleagues who went to earn a day’s wage and never returned home.

At the same time, under the intervention of employers in Greece, the monstrosity of a 13-hour workday is being legislated, crushing our endurance and our lives, as the outcome of all the anti-worker laws that have been passed and implemented by all governments.

This is precisely why coordination, contact, and solidarity among workers must be strengthened. In this direction, our Union puts all its strength and takes the lead in organizing and rallying all workers, regardless of their contract, gender, color, nationality, or age.

Hope lies, therefore, in the unity, mass, and joint action of workers in Europe and all over the world, in the struggle to overthrow capitalist barbarity, so that we may live as brothers and sisters with the wealth we produce in our own hands!

Our Union stands firmly at the side of the United Voices of the World (UVW) and expresses its solidarity. Victory to the workers’ struggle!