Struggle for permanent and stable work

These days thousand of young workers all over Greece protest against EU “STAGE” programmes. PASOK government condemns thousands of young people to unemployment and denies them the right to permanent and stable work. At the same time parties like the conservative ND and the extreme right Laos adopt those EU programs. As far as the opportunists of Synaspismos-Syriza are concerned, their positions are far from the demand for permanent and stable work. They demand the young STAGE workers to be granted some more employment “credits”. In other words, through their demands they promote the idea that the unemployed are responsible for their own unemployment because they haven’t got enough “credits” so as to be employed. All those parties hide the fact that these so called training programmes are in fact vehicles for the promotion of cheap flexible non-insured work.

KKE and All Workers Militant Front (PAME) play an active role in the struggle for the defense of labour rights. In that framework the GS of the CC of KKE expressed the party’s position on the issue of “STAGE” programmes:   
 

Permanent jobs for all

The General Secretary of the CC of KKE Aleka Papariga made the following statement about the workers employed through “stage” after a meeting with the contract employees of “Olympic airways”:

  “The government’s false argument about wishing to achieve meritocracy cannot solve unemployment. It should not speak of meritocracy while the workplaces it offers are much fewer than the thousands of unemployed. The government must speak the truth. It uses meritocracy as a pretext to take away more labour rights for good. We demand permanent jobs for all”.   

Resistance against total servitude

Simultaneously, Aleka Papariga, the General Secretary of the CC of KKE noted in her statement on the implementation of the EU directive about the rented employees and the corresponding steps taken by the government: 

“EU decisions are definite. They abolish all restrictions, even the meagrest ones, concerning the forms of employment, the modern forms of servitude, such as STAGE, employees rental etc. That means that when the government speaks of bringing order it means it will spread and establish flexible forms of employment. That is what it calls “order”. It will probably make tiny investments and also call them “order”.  

For us, it is an exceptionally negative development. It should be repulsed by all the workers, independently of their form of employment. This cannot be merely an issue of the rented employees, of people occupied through STAGE, or of contract employees with 5, 6, or 7 month contracts”.