24h strike on 28/2: For jobs with rights, pay rises – Life with dignity!

The time to fight for our rights in now!

Nobody alone – Nobody scared – nobody uninvolved!

It was our protests and mobilizations that managed to extract everything positive included in the sectoral collective labor agreements οf hotel employees. As long as we compromise and adopt the mindset of the «lesser evil», as the majority of the Federation does, we will lose our rights one by one and our lives will get worse.

After all, it was under the pressure of our Union and other branch unions throughout the country, that the collective labor contract was signed in catering, for the collective regulation of our rights in an industry that numbers tens of thousands of workers. A contract that lags far behind our current needs and that provides work six days a week , satisfying the demands of employers.

The provision for additional pay by 20% when the work exceeds 48 hours per week, means accepting to work 7 days a week. It leads to the exhaustion of the workers and to labor crimes, which employers and governments call accidents. It means the acceptance of the labor jungle with the signature of the majority of the Federation. How many hours, how many days in a row can a cook, a waiter, a delivery person work…? How many more colleagues will we mourn, how many more will be crippled at the altar of their profitability…?

We are focusing our forces on the signing of new, better Collective Contracts, both in the hotel and in the catering industry,  as well as a local collective contract for hotel workers in Attica, which will be at the level of our own needs and will not contain the unfavorable conditions that are added each time so business profitability is better served.

We are re-opening the battle front for Collective Labor Contracts

• Steady work 8 hours – 5 days – 40 hours per week for the whole industry
•  Consecutive rest days
• No arrangement of daily and weekly working hours
• Minimum staff composition
• Maximum room cleaning limit for maids
• Health and safety measures in the workplace.
• Definition of duties for each specialty
• Salary increases
• Put an end to the hostage-taking of fixed-term contracts, the modern slave trade of contract labor and the exploitation of apprenticeships
• Reintegration of all specialties in hazardous occupation, distributors included
• Reinstatement of the One-off payment on 20th year
• Lower retirement age limits

                              ON FEBRUARY 28th

                                     WE STRIKE !

Colleague,

Give a loud answer to all those who think that they got rid of the class movement and that we are weak and unable to take back what they deprive us of.

Don’t fall into the traps they set with the appeal of the «good employer». The limit of every employer’s benevolence is his rate of profit, and he will do everything to increase it, by increasing exploitation and limiting reactions.

The only way to prevent those who want to drown our voice, those who want to crush our lives, is to be united and assertive.

Us workers have inexhaustible powers and we can, with unity and solidarity, chart the path of counter-attack, in the face of both the harsh management of our sector and the hostile policies of all governments in all aspects of our daily lives, from the obscene anti-labor laws to the barbaric insurance changes that have been made. To organize the fight against the policy that destroys public health. The policy that advances the privatization of education. Against tax stealing and housing auctions. Against the inflation that swallows our income, against the new wave of energy poverty that comes with «colored» invoices. Against the politics of profit and «go and let whatever come».  

A year after the riots caused by the loss of 57 fellow human beings, we insist once again that we will not allow the cover up of that crime. Because the true causes of the crime remain  in every aspect of our lives, in every place of work, precisely because the policy that counts our needs and our lives as a cost remains.

After all, this policy is also evident in the much-vaunted model of tourism, the one that constantly generates unfathomable profits for the industry’s business groups, hotels, catering chains and food stores, is being built on our expense ,with the constant shrinking of our wages and rights, with the worsening of working conditions, with the expansion of flexible forms of work, with the hostage of all kinds of contracts, with the expansion of the work for contractors , with the arbitrariness of all employers and the enriched toolbox that , all governments until today, have delivered into the hands of the capital.

We are sick of hearing the familiar big lie «Sit back…let the business do well so we all win», to see their coffers being full while our pockets empty in the middle of every month, to see them hoarding while our salaries are at the levels of 2011, to exploit us even harder and try to extract our consent that «this is the way things are and they don’t change».

OUR GATHERING WILL BE AT 10:30 AT PROPYLEA(Panepistimiou street) WE MEET AT 9:30 AT KANIGOS SQUARE.

THE CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION