Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

A united front of students, destroy the reactionary plans of the rightists. (continued)

Socialist Resistance no40  |  page 17

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

teachers at schools and lecturers at universities would

Ice o duuas eiva: 6av COVEO Los, "Teachers won the respect of the whole of Greek society with their extended struggle"

high for the first four weeks and then started to fall, due to the economic cost to the strikers but also due to the unyielding stance of the government. They were boosted by the results of the local elections where they did not suffer a loss of support despite the fact that they have been implementing neoThatcherite policies for two and a half years. In the sixth week the president of the primary school teachers union and the Prime Minister had a meeting and the majority of the union - a bloc between PASOK and the right - called the strike off SR: Do the teachers feel they

Парота, xupis euE, xup!S have been defeated?

DP: Though the teachers gained minimal benefits from the strike both in terms of pay and the institutional demands, we did not return to school with our heads down. This is because the problems in education became a hot topic of conversation throughout Greek society. The strike also encouraged and gave hope to the rest of the sectors of the working class through its the heroic resistance to the government's austerity program and so teachers won the respect of the whole of Greek society with their extended struggle for dignified working conditions. SR: Why do you think that the strike was unable to decisively defeat the government?

DP: Strikes by just one sector of the working class cannot break the tough economic policy of the neo-liberal government. What was needed was the creation of a front of resistance covering the whole of the working class -which did not happen despite the calls from the teachers for participation in the mobilizations by the rest of the unions. SR: What are the prospects now for the teachers' strike movement and for the demands авосьтохно, of the education sector workers and school and university students?

DP: The creation of a front across the whole of the education sector is possible since the occupations of secondary schools and universities are set to continue ana are soredding and bal combine with the 24-hour strikes by the teachers.

This can create the conditions under which there will be continued political pressure on the government that may force it to resume dialogue and possibly cause it to give in to the demands of the education movement. SR: Has the Left benefited at all from the teachers' strike?

DP: There were gains for the Left which were reflected in the increase in the strength of the Left electoral fronts and their candidates in the local elections which took place during the strike. Also the confidence of the masses in the ideas of the Left increased during the mobilizations and the will of all the workers to fight back was boosted. This dynamic effect will influence significantly the future resistance to the anti-worker choices of the neo-liberal government.