The Green Service of the Municipality of Heraklion and the Urban Planning were toured by a group of the KKE led by Savvas Vassiliadis, Secretary of the OP Crete of the KKE, a member of the KE and a candidate for the European Parliament, and Dimitris Doulofakis, a municipal councilor of Heraklion with the “People’s Rally”.
According to the press release:
At the center of the rich discussion with the workers, there was the burning question of the exactness that forces ordinary families to live with constant cuts in their basic needs to the point that even those who work go hungry as well as the working conditions in the municipalities and in general its services public.
The echelon highlighted the excellent EU-state-local administration cooperation both for the maintenance of low wages that have been maintained at these levels for years, the unfair taxation at the expense of the people, the large price increases in all products for the profits of the few but and implementing a plethora of flexible labor relations especially in local government holding workers hostage and services understaffed. At the same time that they have abolished Collective Labor Agreements, industrial accidents multiply in the logic of reducing labor costs, they subsidize business groups with hot money from bloody surpluses, they give more than 6 billion every year for NATO’s war needs.
S. Vassiliadis emphasized that there are all possibilities for the working people to work with modern labor rights, with permanent and stable work and not with three-month and eight-month employment contracts, like dozens of employees in the municipality, with salary increases, with substantial protection measures in the work. He called ahead to the May Day strike to organize their struggle at their place of work, to demand together relief measures to improve our lives, such as the signing of the SSE with substantial increases, the reinstatement of the 13th and 14th salary in the public sector, the abolition of consumption taxes on fuel and electricity, VAT on consumer goods and others.
Finally, he stated that the current of questioning that was expressed with the strengthening of the KKE, in the parliamentary, regional and municipal elections, needs to be strengthened in front of the European elections and of course to be strengthened in front of the workers’, popular struggles that we fight every day in the workplaces, in conflict with the policy of all the parties that have ruled until now. Only with a strong KKE will the message reach Brussels for a pan-European counterattack.
