FEATURE Anti-austerity


WE’LL KEEP THE RED GLOVES FLYING HERE


Greece’s workers took on austerity – and won


In Greece’s fight against austerity it was the red rubber cleaning gloves of 600 finance ministry cleaners that became the enduring symbol of the struggle of workers and unions against austerity.


The women cleaners set up pickets and then forced international financial bureaucrats to flee the finance ministry – in a symbolic cleaning out of the bankers.


One of Syriza’s first moves when they took over the reins of government was to re- instate the cleaners to their old jobs.


The same was true of school staff and higher education workers, also back in their jobs. Austerity cuts had also led to the closure of ERT radio and television – Greece’s BBC equivalent. It has been re-started and staff re-instated.


Low paid families have been taken out of tax altogether. There is more money for young workers and for pensioners.


Instead of mass sackings, the new government wants to invest in new jobs. The attack on workers’ rights and collective bargaining – demanded by the international bankers in the hated ‘troika’ – will now end.


The bankers had attacked the people they had looked down on and sacked them. It must have been some sight when they had to flee the building through the basement car park chased by women shaking red rubber-gloved fists at them.


For five years workers and unions had fought privatisations, closures, job losses and attack on living standards.


Austerity measures forced on Greece left an economy in ruins and shrunk by a quarter. The result was growing queues at soup kitchens, rising suicides, poverty and half their youngsters without jobs.


Paul Mason, Channel 4 News’ economics editor has himself produced a documentary short about what happened and he still wonders how ordinary people coped.


“We talked to brothel owners having to turn away married women who were trying to become prostitutes.” he told uniteWORKS.


“We talked to graduates with three precarious jobs earning a total of €400 a month. And when you get up into the mountains and rural areas you then find austerity has meant two-thirds of the land has been repossessed. There has been a spate of suicides.”


Union action Despite facing the worst attack on living standards ever seen in western Europe there remained protests and union action. There was also a new political force which grew out of opposition to austerity and offered hope – Syriza.


“Syriza are the only politicians to have gone into these rural areas – used to voting for centrist parties – and you find 30 per cent to 40 per cent of people voting for the radical left,” he said.


It’s that engagement on a social and community level which may help explain how Syriza defeated a right-wing government and won against the odds.


28 uniteWORKS Spring 2015


There is no question the victory sent out a message across Europe that austerity has run its course. Syriza’s victory “made hope possible for millions across Europe” said Unite general secretary Len McCluskey.


“This stunning election victory is a tribute to the Greek people who have now firmly rejected the disastrous austerity policies imposed on them. Their fight against austerity is the same fight that British, Irish and millions of other working people across Europe are waging against the failed politics that protects the rich and well off at the expense of the poor.”


Labour’s much maligned leader Gordon Brown set out the foolishness of those politically wedded to European-wide austerity in an article in the Washington Post in February 2012. He wrote that “the unfolding tragedy of a bankrupt Greece is only a symptom of an even more fundamental miscalculation: a wrong-headed conviction, widely held across Europe, that if austerity is failing, it is because there is not enough of it.”


That miscalculation is pretty much the centre of the current Tory pitch in the UK and internationally: reduce public spending to levels last seen in the 1930s.


The Tory pitch at the UK’s general election in May will be that austerity is forever, not just for Christmas. But what lessons can be learned from how and why Syriza won?


Syriza built from the bottom up with demonstrations and protests. It’s been around long enough to have built solid


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