Two trade unionists of PAME, Akis Antoniou and Petros Poundidis vice-president and board member of the Metalworkers Trade Union of Athens, were imposed yesterday a sentence of 12 months imprisonment suspended for charges of “unlawful violence” that were brought by contractors from Schisto Industrial Park (VIPAS). The lawsuit, which led to the decision, is only one of the dozens of prosecutions that have been brought against the Metalworkers Trade Union to stop its action. Yesterday’s case involved an assembly carried out by workers on March 30^th, 2009, which the local contractor, tried to stop.

Specifically, while 200 workers were discussing the progress of the negotiations for a new Collective Agreement the contractor send men to disperse the meeting, a move that failed because of the response of the workers, as well as the two accused trade unionists.

About the Courts decision Sotiris Poulikogiannis, President of the Metalworkers Trade Union of Athens said:

“The decision of the Judge is at least questionable. Since the beginning of the proceedings she rejected the request for postponement filed by the defense, since one of the two defendants was absent abroad. She refused to submit the four defense witnesses, arbitrarily limiting their number to 2! At the same time she received eight witnesses for the prosecution, people of the employers, who repeated the same “story”, the same slander that workers attacked, without however to be able to bring any substantial evidence, so as to name specifically someone for something illegal. Icing on the cake is the fact that the president has decided that the offense was committed “serial”, despite the fact that only one of the witnesses testified he was attacked.

The mechanism of persecution against the our Trade Union is known, through which  the contractors aim at blocking us, to be able to freely slash wages, extend working hours, to violate health and safety measures, to generally have their hands free to impose sweatshop working conditions. Our Trade Union was, is and will continue to be an instrument of struggle against the plans of the employers. No judicial decision or other attempts to criminalize industrial action will not break the class orientation of our forces. And this decision confirms that employers have declared war on the working class and utilize all their weapons: strikebreaking mechanisms, industry lawsuits, repressive forces and even their henchmen the criminal organization Golden Dawn. We are confident that their efforts will fail. This does not terrorize us; it makes us more stubborn, more determined. We respond with the massive participation of the steelworkers in the nationwide rally of PAME on November 1^st»