Through a range of activities, trade unions are intensifying their efforts to ensure that May Day becomes a turning point preventing the working class from being forced into new sacrifices for the sake of profits and wars.
Dozens of strike rallies are planned across the country.
A few days before the 1 May events, which aim to deliver a militant response to the crimes of capital, Rizospastis reported on conditions prevailing in workplaces:
Three contract workers narrowly escaped death at a Public Power Corporation mine in Kozani while attempting to repair a large machine. In Patras, a 50-year-old worker lost a finger in a press, while in Perama, a 62-year-old man was seriously injured when a crawler excavator crushed his leg.
To make matters worse, the Athens Retail Workers’ Association reports that in just a few months at least 14 workers have been injured in home goods stores.
These are only a few of the daily crimes committed by the state and employers documented in the Rizospastis report, based on complaints from workers themselves and their unions.
It is certain that many more “accidents” occur in the workplace but go unreported, either because they are concealed by employers or because workers are pressured not to report them.
The situation is spiralling out of control due to anti-worker legislation introduces by both the current and all previous governments. Work intensification, the erosion of working hours and labour relations, 13-hour shifts, and extremely low wages have created a “perfect storm” leading to an increase in employer crimes, many of them serious or fatal.
While unions report incidents on an almost daily basis, the government and the state appear to listen only to big employers, who demand that health and safety inspections by the relevant authorities be further tailored to their profitability.
They are, in effect, preaching to the converted. This is evident in the bill being introduced by the government, which marks another step towards the complete dismantling of the Labour Inspectorate and its transformation into a mere instrument of the employers.
Among its many provisions aimed at strengthening and facilitating investment, the bill activates an earlier law passed by the SYRIZA government in 2018, with broad consensus among the bourgeois parties, as a precondition of the memoranda. These forces unite behind every anti-worker decision that serves the strategic interests of employers, such as relieving them of the costs of health and safety, which are increasingly being shifted onto workers themselves.
It is a provocation for workers who are injured on the job or who witness their colleagues dying beside them to read in the bill that the operating criterion of the Labour Inspectorate —now designated an “independent authority”— is “the selection of actions that entail the lowest possible cost for the authorities and those under supervision”.
What does this mean in practice? Even when inspections are carried out thoroughly and shortcomings are identified, “compliance” must be kept to a minimum so as not to undermine competitiveness and profitability! In other words, employers receive little more than a token reprimand —and under the bill, they may even refuse or halt inspections altogether.
No great foresight is needed to anticipate the consequences. The tragedy at Violanda biscuit factory remains fresh in memory, where five workers lost their lives due to the gas leak. Management was aware of the propane leaks that blew the place up, yet failed to act, having imposed a regime of silence and isolation that left workers with no means of raising complaints.
The bill itself confirms that the pursuit of profit lies behind such incidents, with capital and its state acting as the perpetrators, exempting employers even from the most basic formal inspections. The defence of workers’ health, safety, and lives is ultimately determined through class struggle, in opposition to the profit-driven policy that treats even the most fundamental protection measures as costs.
In the face of this criminal policy, it is necessary to further strengthen the organized counterattack through trade unions, demanding not only the obvious —that workers return home safe and sound from their daily labour— but also all the wealth they produce, in opposition to the decayed system of exploitation that commits the gravest crimes for the sake of profit”.