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Greece On Strike or The Necessity to Defend Your Rights
Posted by keeptalkinggreece in Society
I wasn’t very much surprised to receive comments and e-mails from KTG-readers complaining about the strike. And more than anything else about the work stoppage by the air traffic controllers. Even in KTG-FB page the comments were disapproving and showed hardly some understanding. KTG-Readers claimed that as it is high season for tourism, Greece’s ‘heavy industry’, people should refrain from striking not to harm the revenues bringing foreigners travelling to Greece.
I am not going to analyze here, that one part of civil servants are overpaid and they should not have the right to have demands because they have earned very well for doing nothing all these years. Neither am I going to write about all super-paid workers at state-run enterprises (DEKO). I am not because we have a saying in Greece : “Together with the dry wood, the fresh is burned down too.”
But I am going to defend the right of workers to strike. A right that has claimed lots of struggle, lots of lives, lots of tears until it was granted. Shall we let all these have been in vain?
Apart form the historical responsibility to the strike right, there is another aspect: How can people show that they don’t agree with wages and pensions cuts and tax hikes? The new Memorandum of Understanding imposes to all Greeks a series of taxes to everything movable and immovable. I only thins not taxed is breathing and <hmhm>. Employees in Greece will lose at least another salary on taxes. In times with high unemployment and recession. Social allowances will cut into the most essential level.
And the future is blur. Then Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos didn’t not exclude the option of imposing additional measures, should these ones turn fruitless.
So you think, people should not strike? They should just sit there and fatally accept their fate? I don’t think so.
If strikes have no consequences, if nobody feels the lack of working labour and revenues, then strikes fail their purposes. Then we should call them “Flower Parades” or something like that… For examples Air Traffic controllers join the Flower Parade and give roses to new arrivals in Athens airport… That could be done too, but it would be in terms of a promotion campaign for Greece paid by the Ministry of Tourism.
By the way, I read this article on the upcoming strike of teachers and civil servants in UK. ”Taking lawful strike action is a fundamental human right” stresses the author. Or you think, it is a fundamental human right so some but not for all? You can read the article HERE. And if it’s not enough, take a look at Strike Action and Civil Resistance
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Yes of course people have the right to strike. But withdrawing your labour brings with it responsibilities (not a word you hear much these days). The strike must be both proportionate and reasonable. The air traffic contoller strike is disproprotionate because it affects mostly those who have nothing to do with the current crisis – ordinary foreign people who just want a summer holiday. It is unreasonable because it hurts the ordinary Greek people too, hotels, bars and restaurants to name a few, but it will have little effect on the government at whom (presumably) it’s aimed. Political protest, including the right to strike, is a fundamental human right, but rights come with responsibilities and I see little responsibility in the air traffic contollers destroying the image of Greece aboroad. Do you?
do you believe that only tourists use the Greek airports? Not the locals? and as said, it ‘s a work stoppage, not a strike – a huge difference
“ordinary foreign people who just want a summer holiday”
are usually morons that should be mutilated
Yes OK you have a point, I will concede. But does the phrase shooting yourself in the foot mean anything to you?!
The right of workers to strike is exactly that. Nothing more nothing less. So let’s not argue about that.
In the Greek contest though strikes have gotten a whole different meaning than in most other countries. Yes, when teachers and civil servants in the UK go on strike it is an almost unique thing this last quarter of a century. They must be at their wits end. And the unions must feel that all the talks and negotiations are at an dead end.
Here in Greece talks and negotiations never start. First we have a strike then we see if we can talk. And most of the time the strikes are followed by the most extreme and entranged starting points. Never some constructive ideas or a offer to sit around the table hammer someting out that is good for all parties AND the country. No, it is ‘rights’ this and ‘rights’ that. And the phrase “constitutional right” is used almost exclusevely in a way like it is a define thing that only god can break.
You have lived long enough abroad to see how they do things there. No, not the Thatcherite way. But the way most Unions are acting in a lot of European countries. They have often the interests of their members in mind and not the interests of the union leaders.
Just one historical example:
The Wassenaar Agreement was an agreement reached in 1982 between employers organisations and labor unions in the Netherlands to restrain wage growth in return for the adoption of policies to combat unemployment and inflation, such as reductions in working hours and the expansion of part-time employment. The agreement has been credited with ending the wage-price spiral of the 1970s, greatly reducing unemployment and producing strong growth in output and employment. .[1]. The International Labor Organization describes the Wassenaar as “a ground breaking agreement, setting the tone for later social pacts in many European countries.”
More unique even was that unions and employers went with this accord to the government together.
Could you ever envisaged something like this happening here in Greece. I can’t. Not with the current politicians, union leaders and employers. And this is the heart of the matter. Strikes here are totally blunt or blind manifestations of the vested interrest. Blind to anything but their own small circle.
The banners on the Acropolis are just one sign of this. PAME is pushing its own revolutionairy agenda. Cooked up in the bunkers at Perissos. Has nothing to do with what we all are going through now. Nothing constructive. Just some 100 year old adagium. Recooked and served with parmesan cheese. Not even Kefalotiri!
Every day a strike, like it has been for years, and it degrades into folklore and becomes blunt. That is why the Indignant movement started and is relatively succesful compared to those call themselfs unions and who transformed themselfs over the years in lame ducks and part of the nomenklatura.
That’s why I am against nicely paid air traffic controlers going on strike in the middle of tourist season.
Of course, labor has the right to strike. But shouldn’t strikes be directed at those who can make the changes? We had black outs here on the Peloponnese during the heat of the day and it didn’t make me feel any sort of solidarity with the striking electrical workers. In fact, it pissed me off because there is no reason to make my life miserable when I have even less power. Is there no way to make their point directly with the Parliament? But keeping your natural allies in misery does not make any more sense than the austerity program of repaying the INTEREST on the loans is absurd. It cannot be done and Greece will eventually default.
I chose to live in this country; I wasn’t born here. And I’ve personally not experienced the benefits of the “borrowed” money. But I am definitely part of the population paying it back. And I’m paying it back in spades because the government would rather guess at my income rather than actually determine what it really is. How does that help? What it will do is drive people out of the country: those like me and my husband (a dual Greek American citizen) and those young people who can work and/or study abroad.
This is not the way.