250 days of strike! The tough strike is being continued

After 250 days of strike the steelworkers approved unanimously the next steps of their tough struggle, at a General Assembly of their Union which took place on 6th July.

At the General Assembly the strikers decided collectively the next steps of their difficult struggle. The report of the trade union board was approved unanimously.

On the basis of the resolution and its proposals –which was a unanimous decision of the board of the union- they will ask the Ministry of Labour to hold a tripartite meeting so as to discuss the Resolution.

Apart form the resolution and its proposals the union sent to the company a separate document calling for a meeting. The place and the time of the meeting will be specified by the company. In addition, the union will call for a meeting with all the Labour Centers in Attica and ask them to sign its demands and arrange in turn meetings with the Ministry of Labour.

It is worth mentioning that effort of the employers’ mechanism to undermine the general assembly either through the abstention or through interventions that called on the strikers to stop the struggle met a resolute answer by the assembly and its decisions.

The report at the assembly

Girgos Siphonios, President of the Board, presented the report on behalf of the union’s board and noted that the meeting of the Union with the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Labour has not brought any concrete positive result besides the sympathy with our struggle and the advice to “retreat, to water down our positions”.

He added: “during our strike the reduction of salaries through individual and company-level collective agreements has spread rapidly. The arsenal against the workers has been reinforced. Tax-plundering, the shortage of medicine in hospitals, poverty and misery have increased. It is literally an overall war against the working class. In this war we, the steelworkers, have paved new paths. We have taken a bold step further, much further compared to others. This is our achievement, and it constitutes a major victory. (…) Therefore, we, who have fought this great struggle, know that we will continue because our struggle is not a battle that end here. We have a long way go to go till we defeat them. We have to get rid of Manesis, so that we take into our hands the factories and the wealth. The steelworkers who are on strike showed indisputably who is producing the wealth and that “without us no cog can turn”.

Workers’ solidarity

Workers’ solidarity with the steelworkers is being continued both inside and outside the country. Just after the decision to continue the strike a delegation of pensioners gave to the steelworkers 3.000 euro collected from various pensioners’ unions. A delegation of the Union of Teachers in western Attica gave them 500 euro and PAME offered two trucks of fruit and vegetables.