GREEK journalists employed in newspapers are on a national 48-hour strike this Thursday and Friday, while journalists on radio and television are staging their 49-hour national strike on Friday and Saturday.
The action has been called by the Greek Federation of Journalists’ Trade Unions against the government’s Pensions Bill which annihilates the journalists’ own Pensions Fund and imposes huge pension cuts.
The journalists’ union along with the seafarers’ union have appealed to the GSEE (Greek TUC) to call the promised 48-hour general strike against the Pensions Bill, but the GSEE bureaucracy said that the strike will be announced only when the government tables the Bill in the Vouli (Greek parliament).
The Greek government has launched a campaign against those refugees who have been camping in the port of Piraeus and at the Greek/Republic of Macedonia border.
The government intends to put refugees, estimated at about 53,000 now in Greece, into camps but refugees are afraid that these camps would become ‘detention centres’, i.e. concentration camps, as is the case at two camps on the Greek Aegean islands of Khios and Lesbos.
Riot and port police have been harassing refugees and moving their tents, while fascist gangs, of a few dozen, are threatening attacks. A number of trade unionists have mobilised support to the refugees but neither the GSEE nor the ADEDY (public sector unions) have organised mass support.
Last Wednesday, following a refugee support rally at the port of Piraeus, the teacher Pavlos Antonopoulos was being investigated by port police for committing ‘obstruction’. Two years ago Antonopoulos was arrested by riot police in central Athens as he was reading out a trade union declaration against the visit of German Chancellor Merkel.
• The 40-year-old Syrian refugee who was seriously injured by a police vehicle last Monday at Idomeni, on the Greek/Republic of Macedonia border, died early on Friday at a Thessaloniki hospital. A Greek police statement said that the refugee ‘lost his balance and as he fell on the ground he hit the side of a passing police vehicle’.
