The new attack against the working class must not pass!

PAME calls on all workers to rise up and to go on strike on 23^rd June

With the Presidential Decree promulgated by the ministry of Labour on Wednesday, the government creates the most barbarous jungle in the working relations. It seeks to deliver a decisive blow on the workers’ rights. It implements the respective regulations of the memorandum that were promoted by the government, the EU and the IMF.

According to these measures:

• Collective labour agreements are abolished.
• Minimum wages are drastically reduced, especially for the young people.
• Redundancy pays are drastically reduced by 50%.
• Minimum wage is abolished for young people up to 25 years.
• Young people up to 21 years will receive 80% of the corresponding collective agreement or the National Collective Labour Agreement.
• Young people between 21 and 25 years will receive the 85% of the minimum wages.
• The current minimum wage according to the collective labour agreement (740 euro) falls to 592 euro gross which means that a young employee will earn 470 euros nett and a day wage of 21 euro!   
• The regulations for the trainees entail two-year cuts of 500 euros on their already low wages.
• Mass dismissals are promoted more decisively by law, as the current  redundancy threshold (2% per month), which applies for enterprises employing more than 200 employees, increases to 5% and applies for enterprises employing more than 150 employees while in enterprises with less than 20 employees it does not exist at all.
• Redundancy pays are reduced by 50% (from 24 wages to 12).

At the same time, the government, the EU and the IMF demolish the rights of the people to social security and pensions, abolishing pensions and replacing them by an allowance and forcing the people to work after the age of 65. In addition, they cut and commercialise healthcare.  

KKE: the working people must realise the depth of the attack

KKE responded immediately to these measures. The General Secretary of the CC of KKE , Aleka Papariga gave a press conference on these developments and stressed:

“The high public debt was not created by the employees and the people but by the high profitability, the huge state subsidies, the privileges and the tax breaks of the business groups. The business groups are the plunderers. Nowadays, they are the creditors of the Greek government. They participated in the elaboration of the grotesque anti-people memorandum. The Greek people must not recognise and respect neither the debt nor the memorandum.

We ask the government and the Prime Minister personally what the tens of thousands of workers’ families should do, when they will not be able to pay the bills, the tolls, the taxes, when they will not be able buy the necessary food for their families. What will the government do, will it send them all to prison?

The people must declare war to the war of the government of PASOK, the plutocracy, the EU and the IMF that is constantly intensified. The working people are transformed into armies of hungry people.

The Presidential Decree on the working relations demonstrates that the government and its allies are literally unhesitating. They are the gravediggers of peoples’ remaining gains. They impose a lifelong Dachau regime. People are condemned to live and work from the age of 15 till their old age for a single purpose: to feed the capitalist Minotaur. The measures for the working relations and the social security system they promote condemn the working people to work for a minimum wage, pension and healthcare.

There is a deregulation of the dismissals threshold, a drastic reduction of redundancy pays, a legalisation allowing unregistered employment for the young people, who are led to the slavery of traineeship with a starvation wage of 592 € gross- 470 € net!

The dismantlement of the social security system, the drastic increase of retirement ages for all and even more so for the working women and the drastic reduction of pensions condemns workers to work 40 years in succession in order to receive a welfare allowance instead of a pension. These measures actually abolish pensions and impose drastic cuts on healthcare services.

The working people and their children are condemned to a nightmarish insecurity, to a lifelong hard struggle for survival.

Workers need to realise the depth and ferocity of the offensive against their class. The government, LAOS that strongly supports it, ND that consents, aim to serve the interests and needs of the big capital. Their goal is to make workers pay for the consequences of the capitalist crisis, for which they bear no responsibility, and to ensure the future high profits and the strengthening of the Greek capital. They abolish the remaining gains of the workers in order to breathe life into the terminally ill capitalist mode of production. Capitalism is obsolete, rotten and parasitic. It cannot overcome its inherent contradictions, and therefore becomes more aggressive towards the working class, the self-employed, small and medium entrepreneurs.

The workers’ and youth’s duty towards their present and future is not to surrender to the government, the bourgeois parties and the mechanisms of the bourgeoisie. Now, they must resolutely, stubbornly and in an organised manner resist the barbaric capitalist measures. Advocate for their rights and go to the offensive.

KKE calls upon the working class, youth, women, pensioners and the poor peasants to rally their forces in a united decisive battle. We must prevent these measures and overthrow the anti-people policy and its carriers. We must begin our own struggle so as to overthrow the power of monopolies. Stop deceiving us, capitalist development only leads to hardships and suffering, to wild exploitation of youth and to abandonment of the elderly.

A united front of struggle for a path of development serving the people's needs rather than the profitability of the monopolies is needed. In this way, the working class and the people will gain their modern rights to life”.

PAME calls for a 24-hour Nationwide General Strike

    
 
 The working class, people are not responsible for the debt. PAME (All workers’ militant front) calls for a mass militant Nationwide General Strike on 23 June. It urges workers to abandon the conciliatory trade union leaderships of GSEE and ADEDY (confederations of private and public sectors respectively) who shamelessly stated about the government measures that: “At places where these measures were introduced, competitiveness has not risen, food prices have not fallen, the number of jobs has not risen"!!! They merely described the decree as “unconstitutional and unacceptable”.

On the contrary, PAME has issued a class oriented statement: “23 June will be a massive, decisive, militant response. Everybody go on strike. We can stop them. Trade unions must organise the struggle in workplaces. The workers of each and every company must take part in the strike in order to respond successfully to the crime against the rights of the working class”.

On Thursday, 17 June, meetings were held in all major cities of the country. An initial response was given. The demands of the workers are:

• Cancel laws against social insurance.
• Immediately sign the national collective agreement and branch collective agreements providing for substantial increase in wages.
• “No” to the elimination of redundancy pay.
• “No” to layoffs.
• Protection of the unemployed, unemployment benefits amounting to 1.120 euros.