The workers of Elliniki Halyvourgia in Greece have been on strike for 270 days. In October, the factory’s owners informed them that in the current economic climate, they had no option but to move to a five-hour working day.
The factory’s 380 workers would be expected to take a 40% pay cut. And if the union rejected the deal, 180 jobs at Halyvourgia – whose iron rods and girders helped build the Athens metro, the Olympic stadium, and the bridge linking the Peloponnese to mainland Greece – would go.
“Nobody could believe it. From 2009 to 2011, production here rose by 40%, he explains. We were working at full stretch. I had 19 days’ holiday I couldn’t take last year, we were so busy.
The owners said demand had collapsed due to the crisis. We just couldn’t see it.”
“We’ve been overwhelmed by the support, from inside Greece and abroad,” says George Sifonios, 54, the workers’ union organiser and leader of a strike that has come to symbolise the resistance of Greece’s workers to the agonies being inflicted on their country.
Since then, backed by PAME, the communist trade union federation, they have received more than 4 500 letters of support from labour organisations and other groups around the world, including schools. Donations have flowed in.
On May Day, 40 000 people turned up at a rally. In response the company has fired 119 workers. Production has been shifted to a sister factory in Volos, whose workers accepted the five-hour deal – and which is now working at maximum capacity.
A protracted battle over the strike’s legality is being waged.
How much longer can they hold out? Yannis Mourdekas, 35, had worked at Halyvourgia for nine years before he was sacked in November.
He earned €950 (R9 570) a month; his unemployment benefit was recently cut from €460 (R4 634)to €360 (R3 717). His brother is also jobless, and both now live with their mother, whose pension, thankfully, continues to arrive.
One of the factory workers, Georgia Nafplioti’s husband is an electrician with 31 years’ service at the company. But Georgia was made redundant two years ago (meaning she is no longer entitled to benefit) and the couple are also supporting their unemployed daughter and son-in-law.
They have enough savings, she reckons, to survive for another three months. They’re paying bills, but not the raft of new taxes the government is demanding: “If they need the money, they should take it from those who stole it.
We always paid our tax.” She says the company keeps trying to buy her husband off by offering him the points he needs to complete his pension if he’ll sue the union, or threatening to fire him without a payoff.
“But I’ve told him,” she says. “I’d rather he came home with his redundancy papers and no money than sell out. I’m a communist. I won’t back down.”
Source
Numsa News