SCORES of town halls in the metropolitan Athens-Piraeus area were being occupied by municipal workers on Wednesday morning following a decision by the POE-OTA federation of local government trades unions.
The action comes after two days of mass demonstrations of local government workers along with municipal police in Athens against the Greek government’s decision to sack at once 12,500 workers: the entire municipal police throughout Greece, all 2,500 school guards and thousands of teachers and civil servants on the diktats of the troika overlords EC-IMF-ECB.
The Greek two-party coalition government, branded as a junta by Greek workers, sacked all these workers after a mere decision of the Reforms Minister K. Mitsotakis without any discussion in the Vouli (Greek parliament); he admitted that he gave a full list with all the 12,500 sacked workers’ names to the troika representatives in Athens.
The ADEDY (public workers federation) called just a three-hour stoppage on Thursday, while the GSEE (Greek TUC) remains silent.
Trade union leaders supporters of SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left party) have called on the trade union leaders to call a one-day general strike on 18th July, the day the German Finance Minister visits Athens.
Despite the Greek workers’ revolutionary resistance and mobilisations, as seen at the ERT (State TV and radio network) continuing occupation, in health and education and all this week in local government, trade union federation leaders who have spoken out in the past against the ADEDY-GSEE treacherous role, refuse to call out loud and clear for an indefinite general political strike to overthrow the parliamentary junta imposed by the troika.
No-less than 17 trade union federations had issued a call critical of the GSEE-ADEDY and for a mass demonstration at the ERT building on Tuesday night to support the occupation. Not a single federation turned up!
These trade union leaders are unable to respond to the blitzkrieg unleashed by the troika government.
They are paralysed despite the fact that only a couple of weeks ago they actually and publicly called for the organisation of an indefinite general strike to get rid of the austerity accords government.
Now they are backtracking, refusing to recognise the tremendous revolutionary power of the Greek working class and youth and to put up an all-out head-on fight with the treacherous trade union bureaucracy.
Greek workers have been inspired by the revolutionary uprisings in Brazil, Turkey and Egypt and the fight waged by the working class in Portugal, Spain and Italy.
This is clearly a revolutionary situation that requires a revolutionary party that must call for the overthrow of the troika government and of capitalism.
This is the call that has been issued and is being campaigned for by the Revolutionary Marxist League, the Trotskyists of the International Committee of the Fourth International.
