Kozani Builders’ Union: We honor Labor Day – Strike on M. Wednesday

THE PREMIUM IS NOT A HOLIDAY, IT’S A CLASS FIGHT AND A STRIKE

May Day is not a holiday, it is a strike! And thus competitively he will be honored by all the unions of our country.

It marks the struggle of the workers, against their capitalist exploiters, to claim better working and living conditions, but also to pave the way for the abolition of the exploitation of man by man, for the overthrow of capitalist brutality.

From Chicago in 1886, from May 1936 in Thessaloniki to May Day 1944 with the heroic sacrifice of 200 communists in Kaisariani, the working class has written with the indelible ink of its blood the most brilliant pages of the class struggle, of the organized struggle and assertion, which no amount of state and employer terrorism and repression can stop.

We honor the contribution of Nikos Plakopitis, a pioneer for the establishment of the Kozani Labor Center and President of the Kozani Builders’ Union, which was executed in Kaisariani on May 1, 1944.

The claim of 8 hours as a mature need since then, today finds us face to face with the directives of the E.U. and the corresponding anti-labor legislation that all governments and the current one have passed, in order to abolish the 8-hour shift, to make the working time flexible, to establish the 13-hour, 6-day and 7-day work. Laws and directives that found and find the support of employers’ trade unionists who serve capital and bourgeois party politics.

Colleagues

They count profits and we return home less and less. Since the beginning of the year, at least 24 colleagues have been killed, 12 of them in construction. Government has enormous responsibilities. The control mechanisms have disappeared and the checks that are made are for “seen”.

Here and now measures should be taken to protect the workers, the committees should be mixed levels with the unions. The essential measures are to stop working sun by sun. To increase the daily wage so that we can cover our needs and not be obliged to work like slaves.

At the same time in our country the workers experience poverty and exploitation, they are forced to live with wages reduced by 25% compared to 2010, in fact it has made basic survival goods unattainable. Business groups are making record profits on the back of battered workers’ rights, lack of workplace health and safety measures that have left hundreds of our colleagues dead. After all, this is the basic condition for disbursing the huge amounts of the Recovery Fund from the business groups, when our people are forced to put their hands deep in their pockets to even have a doctor in the afternoon surgeries.

This policy is implemented in all EU countries. it is the reason why workers are taking to the streets en masse and fighting for their modern needs. They are hopeful struggles, they show the enormous power of the organized working class, they illuminate the path of perspective against capitalist exploitation.

During the crisis we made 5 and 10 daily wages a month and tried to make ends meet and now we work from morning to night and the money runs out before it even reaches our pocket. It doesn’t go any further. We demand increases in our wages, collective agreements.

We know that in order to conquer them, organization is needed in every workplace, a claim plan and solidarity. An example should be the effort of colleagues who, with trust in their unions and with a united struggle, signed operational contracts, with increases in wages, as was done in a series of factories in Metallo, such as the struggle taking place at the METRO construction site, the struggle taking place in Yannena from the Union at the factory that produces “ZAGORI”, where they are fighting against the law passed by the government for working 7 days a week with 12 hours. As our colleagues at LARCO do.

The strike mobilizations on February 28 and April 17, against the efforts of the GSEE and ADEDY leaderships, the factions of PASKE, DAKE, SYRIZA/New Left who fought these strikes, tried to weaken and undermine them, they gave the message of the working class that against the profits of the capitalists it prioritizes its life!

Imperialist wars and the intensity of exploitation are two sides of the same coin.

75 years since the establishment of the NATO imperialist killing machine and 25 years since the dismemberment of Yugoslavia by NATO and the EU, the workers and popular strata are experiencing the consequences of the intensity of imperialist wars and conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. They are experiencing the consequences of Greece’s ever deeper involvement in this imperialist merry-go-round, of its increasingly strong ties with NATO and the EU, for the benefit of shipowners, industrialists, businessmen and their interests in the region.

Colleagues
For the working class around the world, May Day is a beacon of implacable class struggle. The ND government’s attempt to abolish the May Day strike, based on a SYRIZA law, and turn it into a festive holiday, will not pass.

Our struggles must continue and grow stronger.

Kozani
22.4.2024