Occupation of General Confederation of Workers in Greece by free workers

Source: indymedia

Greek workers have taken over an union (GSEE) building. The union bureaucrats attacked but were driven away (http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog/). Here's the public statement of free workers:

***

We will either determine our history ourselves
or let it be determined without us

We, manual workers, employees, jobless, temporary workers, local or migrants, are not passive tv-viewers. Since the murder of Alexandros Grigoropoulos on Saturday night we participate in the demonstrations, the clashes with the police, the occupations of the centre or the neighborhoods. Time and again we had to leave work and our daily obligations to take the streets with the students, the university students and the other proletarians in struggle.

WE DECIDED TO OCCUPY THE BUILDING OF GSEE

-To turn it into a space of free expression and a meeting point of workers.

-To disperse the media-touted myth that the workers were and are absent from the clashes, and that the rage of these days was an affair of some 500 "mask-bearers", "hooligans" or some other fairy tale, while on the tv-screens the workers were presented as victims of the clash, while the capitalist crisis in Greece and Worldwide leads to countless layoffs that the media and their managers deal as a "natural phenomenon".

-To flay and uncover the role of the trade union bureaucracy in the undermining of the insurrection -and not only there. GSEE and the entire trade union mechanism that supports it for decades and decades, undermine the struggles, bargain our labor power for crumblings, perpetuate the system of exploitation and wage slavery. The stance of GSEE last Wednesday is quite telling: GSEE cancelled the programmed strikers' demonstration, stopping short at the organization of a brief gathering in Syntagma Sq., making simultaneously sure that the people will be dispersed in a hurry from the Square, fearing that they might get infected by the virus of insurrection.

-To open up this space for the first time -as a continuation of the social opening created by the insurrection itself-, a space that has been built by our contributions, a space from which we were excluded. For all these years we trusted our fate on saviours of every kind, and we end up losing our dignity. As workers we have to start assuming our responsibilities, and to stop assigning our hopes to wise leaders or "able" representatives. We have to acquire a voice of our own, to meet up, to talk, to decide, and to act. Against the generalized attack we endure. The creation of collective "grassroot" resistances is the only way.

-To propagate the idea of self-organization and solidarity in working places, struggle committees and collective grassroot procedures, abolishing the bureaucrat trade unionists.

All these years we gulp the misery, the pandering, the violence in work. We became accustomed to counting the crippled and our dead - the so-called "labor accidents". We became accustomed to ingore the migrants -our class brothers- getting killed. We are tired living with the anxiety of securing a wage, revenue stamps, and a pension that now feels like a distant dream.

As we struggle not to abandon our life in the hands of the bosses and the trade union representatives, likewise we will not abandon no arrested insurgent in the hands of the state and the juridical mechanism.

IMMEDIATE RELEASE OF THE DETAINED
NO CHARGE TO THE ARRESTED
SELF-ORGANIZATION OF THE WORKERS
GENERAL STRIKE


WORKERS' ASSEMBLY IN THE "LIBERATED" BUILDING OF GSEE
Wendesday, 17 December 2008, 18:00

General Assembly of Insurgent Workers

Read more: http://athens.indymedia.org/front.php3?lang=el&article_id=948395

We must be thankful for these brave workers and their struggle to take their union movement back and build a strong class struggle movement that will benefit all in that beleaguered country. Other countries will follow suit if they are successful and the time is ripe for it throughout the world now.....including the USA. What an exciting movement for young people to take back this world from those who have brought it to the brink of collapse with greed corruption and crony capitalism.
Only the Labor Movement can effect this change....bless them all!

All hail glorious death, torture, imprisonment! It's such fun!

If it gets bad enough for bloody revolt, so be it. That's when it is harder to live than to die. But don't you dare go spouting that delusional, DEADLY crap to me.

A friend of mine was at Hellenic Broadcasting when it was taken over. She's spent days and days and days immersed in tear gas, elbows locked to form an unbreakable line.

Don't you DARE yammer about glory and excitement when I am hoping to avoid death and maiming for someone I love.

something's afoot...