THE Greek Statistics Authority (ELSTAT) has announced that unemployment reached 27% last February, while youth unemployment (15-24 years old) reached 64.2%, from 54.1% in the same month last year.
ELSTAT said that 1,320,189 workers were unemployed last February in Greece, 245,021 more from February 2012 and 11,663 more from January 2013 (a rise of 0.9 per cent).
Greece is not on its own.
Spain’s unemployment rate soared to a new record of 27.2% of the workforce in the first quarter of 2013, according to official figures. Youth unemployment is at 55.9%. The total number of unemployed people in Spain has now passed the 6.2 million figure.
Meanwhile in ‘strong northern Europe’, France’s unemployment rate rose to a record 3.225 million in March (10.2%), with youth unemployment at 26.9%
In Italy, meanwhile, there is youth unemployment of 38.7%, while in the UK it has reached 21%.
In Ireland, in the last four years, 300,000 workers and youth have been forced to emigrate, that is 10% of the population of the island, while a Labour Party-Fine Gale coalition is threatening to push legislation through imposing wage cuts, pension cuts and job cuts, in a major move to dictatorship.
The whole of the EU is being wracked by a massive crisis where the productive forces – including their most important part, the working class and the youth – are being destroyed at a tremendous rate.
In the face of this catastrophe that is worsening by the hour, the labour and trade union bureaucracy is paralysed with a political fear of revolution.
In Greece, the bureaucratic leaders of the GSEE (Greek TUC) have refused to organise action to overthrow the government and, instead, have been involved, for a month now, in treacherous talks with the bosses.
Workers are so angry at this surrender that the Greek Communist Party (KKE) has now had to instruct its three members in the GSEE Executive to withdraw from the talks which they participated in up to last week.
GSEE leaders are demanding from the bosses the signing of new national collective agreements, that expired last month, and they are prepared to accept more wage cuts and intensified working conditions to achieve this.
Last month the leaders of the National Union of Dockers signed a national agreement accepting a 35% wage cut.
Likewise, the bureaucratic leaders of the Federation of Bank Workers’ Trades Unions (OTOE) for over two months now have been engaged in talks with the bankers. Recently, the OTOE leaders appealed to their members to help with their own wages and savings in the ‘recapitalisation’ of the bankrupt Greek banks!
The president of the Greek Industry and Business Association, Dimitris Daskalopoulos, has called collective agreements a thing of the past, echoing the events in Ireland. If no collective agreements are signed by 14 May, then workers in the private sector will have their wages cut by between 20 to 50%.
Employers would have the right, under a law passed early this year, to impose new levels of wages calculated on the basis of a 586 euros minimum wage. On top of this 586 euros, supplements for years of service, number of children and college or university degrees will be added.
From Ireland to Greece the crisis has reached the point where no sacrifices are big enough to satisfy the bankers and bosses who are in the biggest crisis in their history. This has reached the point in Ireland where a frightened trade union bureaucracy has had to threaten the bosses and the government with another Dublin Labour War (the first was in 1913 and preceded the Easter Rising) if they do not ‘compromise’.
But the era of compromises has gone. The union leaders are merely threatening a Labour War, the workers behind them are deadly serious, and they are equally serious all over the EU.
The time is here for building sections of the Fourth International all over the EU, since we are on the brink of an enormous revolutionary upheaval.
• Build the Fourth International all over Europe!
• Forward to the victory of the European Socialist Revolution!
