Strikes as Greece imposes EU-backed austerity programme

[Hannah Bell]

Strikes have broken out in opposition to the austerity measures being imposed by the Greek government.

Tax officials are staging a 48-hour strike beginning today to protest government plans to cut their salaries and benefits. The cuts amount to an average reduction of €500 net, per month, per worker. The cuts are part of a wage freeze imposed on all public sector workers who earn more than €2,000 per month, and a paltry 1.5 percent wage rise for those below this level. The average tax liability for tax officials will also rise from 20 percent to 25 percent.

Two 24-hour strikes have also been called by the public sector umbrella union ADEDY for February 10 and 17. The action will be joined by the high school teachers union OLME, whose members also voted for strike action to be held on March 8 in protest at cuts. The hospital doctors’ union OENGE will also participate in protest at the proposed cut to the budget for out-of-hours pay.

The cuts are only a part of government plans to impose 10 percent cuts throughout the public sector. Yesterday Prime Minister George Papandreou of PASOK, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement, proposed a package of austerity measures including the public sector pay freeze, fuel duty increases and a possible increase in the retirement age.

Greece has been hit particularly hard by the economic downturn and is going through its biggest crisis since the collapse of the junta in 1974. Public debt has reached record levels and is currently standing at €254 billion. Currently Greece’s deficit is 12.7 percent of GDP, four times the maximum 3 percent required of Eurozone members and three times greater than initial estimates.

The spectre of a Greek default has far reaching implications for the integrity of the Eurozone, of which Greece is a member. Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou met with the International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn last Friday at the World Economic Forum in Davos. He denied that Greece was asking for aid from the IMF and said he was only seeking technical advice on how to reduce the deficit. The government has also denied reports that it has sought aid from China in the form of bonds worth €25 billion.

From the EU’s perspective, IMF and Chinese aid is to be avoided at all costs—given that it implies that it is unable to deal with its own internal problems. Bailing out Greece would undermine the euro’s standing in international markets, but if Greece were to go bankrupt, then the crisis could rapidly spread to Portugal, Spain and Italy, where public debt is exceptionally high, and drag the entire Eurozone into the resulting maelstrom.

The EU has been leaning very heavily on Greece to impose savage cuts and pass the cost of the crisis on to the working class. The European Commission (EC) backed Greece’s austerity measures yesterday, aimed at cutting the deficit to below 3 percent by 2012, but demanded the government go much further in imposing measures, including “pension and health care reform” and “the wage bargaining system.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/feb2010/gree-f04.shtml

[Ken Burch]

1. Greece is no longer a sovereign country.

Your country's sovereignty has been lost if the government you elected has been forced by external institutions to impose policies you, the people, voted against.

The EU had no right to force PASOK to impose economic and social policies that are to the RIGHT of the conservative party PASOK defeated in the last election. It's no different than if the EU had sent in troops to overthrow the Greek government.

[Hannah Bell]

3. are there sovereign countries anymore? i'm not so sure.

[Ken Burch]

2. It's sickening that anyone "unrec"ed this.

Democrats are supposed to fight AGAINST austerity policies.

[Hannah Bell]

4. it's not our fathers' party any longer.

[Freddie Stubbs]

6. Perhaps it was because it was from an anti-Democratic site

[Ken Burch]

7. Doesn't mean we can't learn from the ideas

We need to regard people who criticize the party from the left as people we COULD find a way to reach out to.

[leftstreet]

8. There are many, many links to this story

Greeks must fight the neoliberal EU

Greece is being condemned with a familiar, anti-democratic cure worse than the disease – and ordinary workers pay once again

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/feb/04/greece-eu-fiscal-policy-protest



Strikes in Greece and political wrangling in Portugal fed Europe's government debt crisis on Thursday, amid concerns that leaders in Athens and Lisbon would not be able to push through unpopular austerity programs to tame their ballooning deficits.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=9744277




UPDATE 1-Greek taxmen kick off wave of strikes against austerity
Tax officials strike over pay squeeze

Bonds

* Wider strikes planned against austerity policies

* Greek budget crisis has hit euro, bond prices

(Adds PM statement)


http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE6132CR20100204

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. On the other hand, Joseph Stiglitz thinks the measures are about right

Short interview with him here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/gavinhewitt/2010/02/s_6.html . Stiglitz doesn't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the Greek economy, and that it's speculation that is speading the talk of 'bankruptcy': http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6114WH20100202

The EU does indeed have some right to intervene - Greece is in the Eurozone (and joined under the previous PASOK government, in 2000), and thus agreed to tie its economic policy to the other Eurozone countries.

[leftstreet]

9. K&InvisibleR

[anonymous171]

10. You give up your economic sovereignty, bad things tend to happen.