The head of the Central Committee of the KKE raised the rhetorical question of whether the government is aware of the real situation experienced by workers every day
“Where they owed us, they also took our ox. What else can one say, when listening to Mr. Mitsotakis in today’s debate to take stock of the government’s work on social policy! Your calling the crumbs of the minimum wage ‘social policy’ provokes mockery. The same is true of what you may call pro-labour, but in reality it worsens the position of the working class more broadly. I also refer to the Hatzidakis anti-labor extreme, and to the privatization of the insurance and other, supposedly ‘social’, said the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the KKE, Dimitris Koutsoubas, in his today’s speech in the Parliament.
He raised the rhetorical question of whether the government is aware of the real situation experienced daily by workers and popular strata, noting, characteristically, that due to the precision, which multiplies the burdens of previous years, 60% of families make cuts in basic needs, and the 50% cannot even cover them, while talking about the popular roof “that even today capitalism cannot solve, the socialism we have known since 1930 had dealt with it”.
He said, among other things, that “with alchemy, the government can show reduced unemployment rates”, but “it cannot eliminate those who were forced to leave, immigrants and the hundreds of thousands who are semi-employed, but are generally registered as workers, since with the law that the government voted and one hour of work a day is enough for someone to be registered as an employee”. He added that the government cannot eliminate either youth unemployment or long-term unemployment.
D. Koutsoubas said that the government took advantage of the pandemic to implement “with the various business groups what was most pending”, mentioning first of all the release of layoffs without “any limit and no labor protection”.
At this point in his speech, giving as an example the mass layoffs at Kavala Oil and Kavala Fertilizers, he said that the government is also proceeding with the “new crime at LARCO by stopping its production activity from August 1st as a result of the disgrace you voted for, in a period when nickel prices are at their highest.”
“You will not escape the stool in this case, but above all you will not escape the wrath of the workers and their families,” he stressed, addressing the government.
He said that the government calls “social protection” the privileges it gives to various entrepreneurs at the expense of workers, while it similarly calls “social policy” the business of “putting political and trade union freedoms in plaster.”
Speaking, among other things, about the Digital Work Card, he said that it is “the modern tool for measuring working time for the benefit of large-scale employers”, mentioning, then, a shower of complaints from unions that workers were instructed to “punch” the work card in retrospect for not to show their overtime work.
He reminded that this “innovation” was voted for by both SYRIZA and PASOK/KINAL when they “voted for half the articles of the Hatzidakis law”.
He also noted the absence of controls as the Labor Inspection Body was transformed into an Independent Authority to “absolve the state of all responsibility and from union pressures to intensify controls.”
Speaking about the pensioners, he said that the government has “the political responsibility for the statute of limitations of retroactive pensions, those pensioners, after their own promptings, did not go to the courts, and underlined: “Proceed now with legislation in order to give retroactive pensions to all pensioners ».
He added that there is no support for low pensioners and the state guarantees a “gratuity”, while he called “the shame of the pensions, whose issuance is pending, which essentially concerns 140,000 families with no income”.
He even said and explained that turning insurance into a stock market product is not social policy, but risk and gambling.
He denounced the reduction of state spending on welfare by 50%, the failure to fill the huge gaps in educational staff, the shortcomings in measures to prevent and deal with violence against women.
He denounced the government’s health policy, stressing that the government refuses to support public hospitals, health facilities, and health centers.”
“You reassure the people so that the tourism capital does not lose a single euro. You are following the same recipe that brought the public health structures to an impasse,” he said characteristically, while calling on the government to comply with the decisions of the Council of Ministers and to restore the salaries of hospital doctors to the levels before the cuts.
Speaking of the personal doctor, he spoke of a “safari that the insured has to go on for a basic package of tests, when and if”, adding “if he doesn’t make it then not only will the wait for a much-coveted regular hospital appointment increase , but will also be punished additionally, paying more expensively for examinations and treatments”.
D. Koutsoubas said that the government said nothing about supporting farmers, breeders, self-employed professionals and traders.
“Ultimately, under the umbrella of so-called social policy (the government) squeezes in measures that it can say benefit the majority of society, but looking closely, you see that its shadow falls and protects only the permanently and multiply benefited few business groups he said characteristically.
He said, among other things, that all the staffs – European and international – are talking about a new “Armageddon” in the face of a new crisis.
He stated that the government and personally Mr. Mitsotakis are cultivating false expectations in the people, for the exit from the regime of enhanced supervision and false hopes for high rates of growth, “as if the Greek economy is in a glass, isolated”. “The people know that the unbearable burdens imposed on them in the last decade still remain intact,” he stressed.
He said that ND, SYRIZA and PASOK/KINAL are committed to the Recovery Fund “which is also the new “extra memorandum” at the expense of the peoples of Europe and Greece”, as they voted for its contracts.
He also mentioned that “the candy of SYRIZA’s “progressive governance” has melted as “neither the memoranda – both old and new – are progressive, nor the so-called green transition, nor the commitments of all of you to the USA and NATO”. He said that what the SYRIZA government brought was not out of obligation to get the country out of the memorandums, but its own choice, like SYRIZA’s choice is to vote in favor, as an opposition, over half of the ND government’s bills.
“The ND sells the ‘without delay, implementation’ of the anti-popular policy at any cost… SYRIZA puts on the market, the “ensuring of social consent in possible conditions of social or other crisis”…
And PASOK, its willingness to support either government.
Opposite all of you, there is the KKE which is the only force that can and does provide answers to today’s impasses. Answers, however, that also require a conflict with this current path, which you are all following and which want the people themselves to be the protagonists of the developments and in claiming all of them.
Why, the government reports of both the current government and the previous ones that ruled before are good, but the real, final report will be made by the workers themselves” concluded D. Koutsoubas in his speech.
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