Strikes continue in GREECE

www.ft-ci.org
La Verdad Obrera 309, Thursday, January 8, 2009
Strikes continue in Greece
By Alejandra Ríos

A month after the murder of the youth Alexis Grigoropoulos at the hands of the Greek police in an Athens neighborhood, protests continue occupying the streets and Greek politics. They did not manage to calm the spirits of the youths, even for the Christmas holidays; on that occasion, the youths went out to burn Christmas trees placed by the government as if nothing had happened.

The brutal murder of Alexis was an escalation of repression that has as its background two years of workers' and students' resistance against the privatizing and belt-tightening attacks of the conservative Karamanlis government of the New Democracy party. There have been 4 general strikes since 2006, with some factory seizures. Furthermore, there were student mobilizations with seizures of buildings, in opposition to the reductions in education. It would also be fitting to mention strikes in some factories and very important unions, like the case of the Siemens workers, the teachers' strike that lasted six weeks, and the strike of postal workers against privatization, and that of the sanitation workers that lasted four weeks.

The student movement responded forcefully. Thousands went out to demonstrate their anger by confronting the repressive forces. Teachers and other groups that were coming from previous struggles rapidly joined the demonstrations, as shown by the December 10 general strike, called beforehand.

The causes of the rebellion in Athens have much more deep and broad reasons than the government and the international press are willing to point out. We must seek the reasons in the economic crisis that the country is confronting and the social policy impldmented by the government, that affects education, the retirement system, and other social services. An expression of this is the fact that the teachers', university and high school students' unions have called a mobilization in Athens for January 9 against the government and police brutality. The union that brings public employees together, ADEY, also called for a cessation of activities and is calling on the workers to leave the workplaces beginning at noon, so they can join the students' and teachers' mobilization. This measure will affect hospitals, government agencies and the whole public adminstration.

There is also a call for a 24-hour strike by subway workers, who will bring service to a standstill on Thursday, to express their rejection of the new proposed collective work contract presented by the company.

All these groups in struggle and in a state of mobilization have scheduled a meeting on Monday, January 12, to discuss the call for a 24-hour strike and plan the continuing measures of struggle. But the Greek resistance movement does not appear to have been shut away inside its own borders: on Saturday, January 3, thousands of people went out to the streets and squares, just like in other big European cities, to repudiate Israel's attack on Gaza. Besides, next Saturday, the member organizations of the "No to the War!" coalition have called another national march that has the support of several militant unions.

A big crisis of the Greek political establishment began with the last elections, in September 2007. New Democracy, which is in the government, and the social democracy, PASOK in the parliamentary opposition, are sinking in the polls, losing all credibility, which has led to talk of the end of the Greek two-party system.

The union leaderships, including the biggest, the Greek Communist Party (KKE), quickly repositioned themselves, owing to pressure from the rank and file, going so far as to recognize publicly that the rebellion underway "is not a matter of anarchist youths that throw Molotov cocktails and break windows, but of a profound dissatisfaction of groups of workers, which has led to the rise of an anti-imperialist and anticapitalist resistance movement."

The struggle underway raises not only the possibility that the government crisis will worsen (the government is trying to emerge from the crisis through reshuffling the cabinet), but that it could go so far as to cause the fall of the Prime Minister. The Greek scene shows the governments and the bourgeoisies what they could face, in trying to apply their anti-worker plans to attempt to save their necks, given the world economic crisis.