Resisting Austerity: The Case of Greece’s Powerworkers and Steelworkers

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RESISTING AUSTERITY: THE CASE OF GREECE”S POWERWORKERS AND STEELWORKERS

Abstract

This paper studies workers’ agency in the context of government austerity measures in contemporary, crisis-hit Greece. It focuses upon the spatial aspects of two cases of worker mobilisation. The first of these involves powerworkers who supported widespread popular protests against a new property tax designed to raise government revenues. Importantly, the government had sought to collect this tax by adding it to people’s electricity bills, a novel method which generated massive opposition. The second concerns strike activity engaged in by steelworkers employed at the Greek Steelworks SA in Aspropyrgos, in the capital region of Attica. These workers were responding to the company’s taking advantage of new laws designed to increase flexibility in labour markets by allowing employers to fire more people than they otherwise would have been allowed to do. The paper analyses the different tactics employed in both of these quite different efforts to challenge Greek austerity measures. In analysing these different tactics we explore the role of in-place and trans-local networks of solidarity in response to government policy. A deeper

understanding of such factors, we would suggest, may contribute to strengthening the prospects of workers’ struggle in places and spaces where painful capital devaluation diminishes workers’ rights and dismantles social and employment protections.

Keywords: Labour Geography, agency, labour flexibilisation, solidarity, Greece, Southern Europe

Resistiendo la Austeridad: El caso de los trabajadores Griegos de la energía y el acero

Resumen

Este artículo examina la agencia de los trabajadores en el contexto de las medidas de actuales austeridad en la Grecia impactada por la crisis. El artículo se enfoca en los aspectos espaciales de dos casos de movilización de los trabajadores. El primer caso concierne trabajadores de la energía que apoyaron una protesta masiva en contra del nuevo impuesto a la propiedad diseñado para aumentar los ingresos gubernamentales. El gobierno decidió recolectar este impuesto mediante su inclusión en la cuenta de la

S.E. Gialis

A. Herod

Department of European Civilization, Hellenic Open University

and Department of Geography, University of Georgia*

Department of Geography, University of Georgia

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S.E. Gialis and A. Herod

electricidad de los usuarios, causando oposición a masiva a este nuevo método de cobro. El segundo caso concierne la huelga desatada por los trabajadores del acero empleados por la compañía Griega Steelworks SA, en Aspropyrgos, región capital de Attica. Estos trabajadores respondieron a las políticas de la empresa que, apoyada en nuevas leyes diseñadas para aumentar la flexibilidad en los mercados laborales, podía despedir más trabajadores que durante el anterior régimen legal. El artículo analiza las diferentes tácticas empleadas en estos dos esfuerzos para desafiar las medidas de austeridad Griegas. Al analizar estas tácticas exploramos el papel de las redes de solidaridad locales y trans-locales que se crean en respuesta a las políticas gubernamentales.

Sugerimos que el mayor entendimiento de estos factores puede contribuir a fortalecer las perspectivas de la lucha de los trabajadores en espacios y lugares donde la dolorosa devaluación del capital disminuye los derechos de los trabajadores y desmantela los sistemas de protección sociales y laborales.

Palabras clave: Geografía del trabajo, agencia, flexibilización del trabajo, solidaridad, Grecia, Europa del Sur.

*Acknowledgments

This research is conducted in the frame of the first author’s post-doc research activity under the title ‘The Southern EU flexicurity project’ which is jointly funded by the Greek Ministry of Education, General Secretariat of Research and Technology (Funding Decision: 11409/ 31-8-2012) and the EU.

“…joined by common hopes, if only for an instant…’ February 1848, Alkis Alkaios, 1978

Introduction

In recent years the issue of the European Union’s (EU) ongoing economic crisis has probably become the most common topic of discussion about the Union, both within it and beyond it. Despite the fact that recessions were also present in previous decades,

the current situation has been presented by many as the most serious challenge collectively faced by Europe since the 1930s. Something is not functioning well in capitalist production and labour markets, it seems, a fact that has been widely acknowledged (Harvey 2006; Michael-Matsas 2010; Berberoglu 2011). As a result, several southern EU members, but especially Greece, have continued to make headlines as fear of their potential default on international loans and political instability abound.

For its part, Greek capitalism has been part and parcel of the EU’s operation since the early 1980s and over the years several commonly agreed-upon economic reforms have been implemented in the country, in accordance with the neoliberal turn in the Union’s policies. However, during the present crisis it has now been ‘suddenly realised’ that Greece is a nation of ‘counterproductive patterns’, excessive ‘protectionism’, ‘tolerance of corruption’, and ‘huge public spending combined with widespread tax evasion’ (Selçuk and Yılmaz 2011). Based upon such a rhetoric, one widely reproduced in and through the media, the rather painful consequences that the post-2009 crisis has had upon the Southern EU in general, and Greece in particular, have been represented as largely inevitable phenomena. The result is that the necessity for restructuring the Greek economy according to capitalist rules and imperatives has been ‘naturalised’ (Hadjimichalis 2010; Sakellaropoulos 2010). To borrow a quote from Margaret Thatcher in a different context: Europe’s bankers have told Greek workers that there is no alternative but to get the country’s financial house in order and the only way to do so is through various austerity measures.

In light of this, our paper adopts a spatially informed perspective to study workers’ actions against austerity measures in contemporary Greece. Greece has a rich history of labour militancy and resistance, especially of trade union collective action combined with non-formal, yet equally important, forms of opposing capital’s interests (Leontidou 1990; Leontidou 1993; Hadjimichalis 2011). Our study of the spatiality of labour agency focuses upon two specific cases of workers’ seeking to challenge the

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RESISTING AUSTERITY IN GREECE

policies being implemented by the Greek government as part of its economic ‘reforms’ designed to ‘solve’ the crisis. The first of these examines actions by the powerworkers of the Public Power Corporation SA (Dimosia Epixeirisi Hlektrismou). The powerworkers supported widespread demonstrations against a new property tax designed to increase state revenues, a tax which the government intended to collect through the mechanism of placing it on people’s electricity bills and threatening to cut off their power should they not pay it. The second case is that of the strike begun by steelworkers employed in the Greek Steelworks SA (Hellenic Halyvourgia) in Aspropyrgos, in the region of Attica, where the Greek capital, Athens, is located. In this case, the steelworkers were challenging rationalisation measures being taken by the firm which was seeking to take advantage of new laws passed by the government as part of the ‘economic reforms’ mandated by the European Union and other international creditors – specifically, laws aimed at making Greece’s labour market more flexible and competitive by allowing greater levels of layoffs and lower levels of wages than had previously been the case. Our study is based upon secondary material as well as interviews with key informants (primarily unionists and others involved in various solidarity actions) conducted between September 2012 and February 2013.

In our analysis, then, we explore the role of in-place and trans-local networks of solidarity in the formation of workers’ spatial practice (Herod 2001; Lier 2007; Herod 2012). In particular, we suggest that the failure of steelworkers to form a place-to-place tie between the two different cities in Greece where their employer’s plants are located, despite several efforts to do so, resulted in their failure to develop a potential ‘upscaling advantage’. This inability to ‘go national’ had serious negative consequences for the prospects of these workers’ success. Hence, despite the important trans-spatial solidarities they developed, their inability to bring national pressure to bear on the government left workers ultimately with none of their major claims fulfilled. By way of contrast, the choice of the (relatively well-paid and protected) powerworkers to actively support the anti-tax movement and help

this movement to expand the scale of its struggle to make it a national one provided them with some significant successes, the most important of these being that their own claims gained wider support. However, as we shall discuss, the union’s failure to stop the subcontracting out to private operators of the job of cutting off property tax non-payers’ electricity prevented its complete victory. This failure was largely the result of the union’s inability to develop a long-lasting and synchronized trans-local action on the part of its members.

The paper is organized as follows. In the first section we offer a brief presentation of the crisis in Greece and its general consequences for labour and employment. We also briefly outline the reaction of the labour movement to the current situation. The next two sections present the two case studies. The final section discusses these findings and makes some concluding comments.

The post-2008 Greek crisis, the default ‘spectre’, and consequences for labour

Following trends that started in the US mortgage and housing sector in late 2007, a severe wave of recession, one that for many was comparable to the 20th century’s inter-war period, soon spread across the EU and other countries. Widely portrayed as a ‘crisis of public debt’ and the consequence of letting financial ‘golden boys’ play the market with insufficiently regulated and ‘intoxicating’ new products like synthetic collateralised debt obligations, it is an ongoing crisis that is still causing upheaval to many, if not the majority, of the capitalist economies across the globe.1 Critical scholars and economists have directly linked this crisis to the problems of overaccumulation and the consequent painful devaluation that it has coercively, though unevenly, imposed upon various economies. The rhetoric that such devaluation represented ‘necessary market corrections’ runs quite counter to the very identifiable actions of various different actors (bankers, industrialists, transnational

1 Synthetic collateralised debt obligations are portfolios of credit default swaps. They are a form of derivative that was at the heart of the sub-prime mortgage crisis.



monetary institutions, and so forth) and segments of capital who brought about the crisis and so are responsible for its consequences (Harvey 2006; Berberoglu 2011; Mavroudeas and Papadatos 2012).2

Soon after recession came to the EU and the Eurozone in early 2009, an imagined geographical dividing line surfaced between the Northern, supposedly ‘wise’, industrious and relatively ‘prepared’ economies and the so-called PIIGS of the South and the periphery (i.e., Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain). Such a distinction was widely reported in the media and fed fears that there would be a collapse of the common currency and the failure of the Euro-area. Greece was portrayed as being the leading problem in this discussion and was widely seen as the black sheep of the EU because it had ‘wasted’ the many chances it had been offered to become a ‘truly modern’ society. It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide an analysis of the reasons for the post-2008 Greek crisis and the common misconceptions associated with it (for such an analysis, see: Sakellaropoulos 2010; Hadjimichalis 2011; and Selçuk and Yılmaz 2011). However, what should be stressed is that many analyses of the situation tend to neglect the fact that Greece has been highly integrated into global capitalist structures during previous decades, being a relatively developed semi-peripheral country of the EU (Michael-Matsas 2010; Sklias and Tsampra 2013). This raises the question of whether Greece’s problem was not that it was insufficiently incorporated into the global capitalist economy but, rather, whether it was too well incorporated.

A brief analysis of the consequences that the crisis has had upon the Greek economy and employment figures provides important background on the country’s socio-economic framework and how it strongly influenced the outcome of the two worker struggles under study. Figures regarding the fast pace of devaluation highlight the painful reality that Greek workers and citizens have been facing since the crisis emerged. Indeed, such has been the depth of the crisis 2 Two specific individuals are J.P. Morgan’s Peter Hancock,

who pioneered the market in derivatives, and Goldman Sachs trader Jonathan Egol, who helped develop synthetic collateralised debt obligations.

that the rate according to which forces of production have been destroyed in the country is only comparable to societies at war or going through major political transformation, as was the case of post-state-socialist counties in Europe in the 1990s. For instance, between 2008 and 2012 Greek nominal GDP witnessed a cumulative reduction of nearly 20% and it is expected to continue to fall in 2013 and 2014.3 Moreover, the successive waves of ‘structural reforms’ and cutbacks in public spending that have stemmed from the three memoranda of understanding agreed upon by the government, the EU and the IMF in order to ‘deal with the spectre of default’ have paradoxically led to increasing public debt, which is expected to return to pre-crisis levels (i.e., below 120% of the GDP) only after 2020.

A collapse in the labour market has been the unavoidable outcome of such austerity measures and other changes in government expenditure. Greece has already overtaken Spain as the EU’s leading country for unemployment. As of late 2012 the official unemployment rate was 24.8% (which represented a 166% increase between 2009 and 2012) and there were 1.25 million unemployed. Significantly, fewer than 30% of these were receiving any unemployment payments. For the first time since the end of World War Two, the number of employed individuals (some 3.7 million people) is far less than the number of the economically non-active population (at 4.6 million people). Unemployment amongst the young hit 56.6% and 352,652 new individuals were added to the total number of the unemployed during 2012. Indicative of the depth of the crisis is the fact that in 2012 ten individuals were added to the unemployment rolls every 15 minutes. These profound changes have turned the Greek labour market from one of the most restrictive into one of the most flexible in the EU. There has been a dramatic increase in previously less common employment forms, such as part-time work. At the same time, many other well-established atypical and precarious forms of work, such as self-employment, temporary

3 All data for the corresponding years are retrieved from the official website of the Hellenic Statistical Agency (www.statistics.gr).

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employment and employment as family helpers, have declined (Gialis 2011). This vicious downward spiral has spawned certain reactions in the labour market, the most prominent being outward migration and the proliferation of informal employment and other activities. The result is that many ‘structural deficiencies’ that were widely condemned by EU officials and the national elites as sigs of backwardness (Leontidou 1990; Karamessini 2008) are now being reproduced on a wider scale by devaluation policies that officially seek to restore competitiveness and neoliberal rationality in the country. For example, not only has tax evasion continued but in many ways it has become worse and more systemised as many employers have formally fired their workers but have kept employing them informally, though at lower levels of compensation. Through such a practice employers avoid paying social security taxes and their employees are able to receive unemployment benefits (for up to 12 months) in addition to the (reduced) wages that they are now being paid under the table. The result is that the government’s efforts to crack down on tax evasion in order to increase government revenues have actually exacerbated the problem.

Responses by workers to this new reality have been numerous. Social unrest and riots gradually intensified as the austerity measures were implemented and more than 20 general strikes have been organised since the recession first hit. Yet, these actions failed to stop the general worsening of workers’ standards of living. This has partly been due to the chronic weakness of the country’s official labour movement, the national Trade Union Federation of Greece (GSEE). GSEE retains strong connections with the social democratic PASOK (the Panhellenic Socialist Movement), the party that has ruled Greece for more than two-thirds of the post-dictatorship period (1974-the present). The Federation, following PASOK’s gradual political reformulation after it came to power in 1981 from a radical socialist to a neoliberal one, gradually lost its class-based approach to politics. It has been transformed during the past two decades or so into a severely weakened representative of workers and, despite its rhetoric advocating for working-class rights and demands, has lost much of its previous militancy

and thus support amongst labour. Suffering from the global trends of de-unionisation, it has now been turned into a narrow-based federation of those trade unions that largely represent workers at the big utility and infrastructure companies that were historically owned by the Greek state, most of which are now semi- or fully privatised. The relative importance of such unions within the Federation’s General Assembly, though, is disproportionately large when compared to those unions historically representing workers in large private sector firms, whilst the vast amount of workers employed at small to middle-sized Greek firms are not represented by any union.

It is significant that since the early 1980s the great majority of the Federation’s Presidents and General Secretaries, as well as many other elected trade unionists, have been employed in various state-owned companies (e.g., the National Bank, Greek Railways, Public Power Corporation, etc.). Most of them were relatively well-off and earned above-average wages. They also enjoyed a lot of additional privileges, such as extra periods of leave and strong political connections. This labour aristocracy, with its relatively stable employment, gradually gained control of the official labour movement.4 These changes had several consequences for the Federation’s ideological and political practices which ultimately, and following EU trends, accepted the ideological hegemony of capitalist relations whilst adopting the discourse on the need for social partnership and inter-class compromise.

As soon as recession occurred, then, the Federation was ill-placed to respond effectively and it has been left to rank-and-file members, class-orientated unions and other social actors (e.g., the ‘piazza’/ ‘indignados’ movement), especially in the capital and other big cities, to develop alternatives to government

4 Some of these trade unionists eventually became elected parliamentarians, in most cases through participating in the electoral lists of the two parties that interchangeably ruled the country (i.e., the social democrats and the conservatives). These two parties were forced to form a coalition government in June, 2012 after each was unable to secure the necessary 151 seats in parliament to rule individually.



policy (Leontidou 2010).5 On the one hand, these grassroots initiatives have managed to develop local and trans-spatial solidarity networks and delayed the implementation of several austerity provisions, such as the ‘urgent’ anti-default tax imposed through the power bills discussed below. They have also halted some sizeable worker dismissals in certain big (and in some cases quite profitable) firms. On the other hand, however, they have failed to stop a general reduction of incomes in excess of 30% and the growth of unemployment, which has led to a massive exodus of the population towards Germany, Sweden, Australia and other destinations.

Having provided a background to the Greek situation, we now turn to two cases involving workers’ struggles to challenge government austerity measures, focusing particularly upon the spatial characteristics of these struggles.

The case of powerworkers’ solidarity action against the property tax

The Public Power Corporation (DEH) is the major electricity producer in Greece – it generates about 70% of all electricity – and is the sole electricity retailer. Additionally, DEH is obliged to purchase the power generated by private and alternative producers that have recently established natural gas power plants and wind/ solar-power generators. The company has been quite profitable in recent years as it has marketised much of the power production-consumption complex within the country.6 One of the basic reasons for the company’s profitability has been its monopoly over the extraction and use of coal, a relatively cheap and abundant source of energy found in many Greek regions (Burnes et al. 2004).

5 Such movements began to form in Summer 2010 and are constituted by frustrated citizens who gather daily in piazzas in Greece and Spain in an effort to implement direct democracy (Dhaliwal 2012).

6 Although DEH has been partly privatised it remains under state control. However, it has marketised many of its practices in the realm of both electricity production and consumption, such as charging less per unit as consumption increases.

In September 2011 the government announced its decision to collect a property tax through DEH’s bills sent to all Greek households that are connected to the electricity grid. The Greek Minster of Finance at the time, Evangelos Venizelos, claimed that the tax was ‘the only one that can be enforced and produce results immediately because it does not depend on the [regular] tax collecting mechanism’. The tax was imposed at the end of a period (winter 2010 to fall 2011) during which a lot of other government spending cutbacks and savings had already been put in place, following the suggestions of the EU-IMF-European Central Bank troika that had monitored the Greek economy since late 2010. The basic idea behind it, at least as officially proclaimed by members of the Cabinet, was that Greeks should pay this extra amount in order to save the country from default and thus their properties from devaluation. This latter invocation was significant because almost 80% of Greek households own at least one house or apartment and Greece is one of the leading – if not the leading – countries in the EU in terms of private ownership of property (Sakellaropoulos 2010).

The property tax was aimed at all owners of commercial and residential buildings, houses and apartments connected to the national grid. In the cases of rented properties, the tenant was obliged to pay the tax and either hold back the amount paid from the rent or to ask their landlord for a refund. This produced significant conflict between tenants and landlords. Should the tax not be paid, the government warned emphatically, then DEH would cut off all electricity connections to non-compliant properties. In the case of empty houses, the government declared that if owners were to terminate their power connection in an attempt to avoid paying the tax then the tax would simply be transferred from DEH to the public taxing authority.

The tax’s announcement was met with considerable social unrest. Quickly dubbed ‘haratsi’ (a word that comes from the days of Ottoman rule and signifies a heavy, authoritarian and unequal tax), the tax was considered by many to be regressive and unjustified

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because most Greek citizens had been paying taxes for their properties for many years and the government’s actions were an effort to blackmail them into paying the tax or face having their electricity supply cut off. Moreover, not only was the tax very heavy but it was seen as deeply unfair to those in Greece’s lower socio-economic strata because properties that varied considerably in terms of their value nevertheless had to pay quite similar amounts of tax. In fairness to the government, it was not deliberately planned this way. Rather, this method of implementation was a reflection of the structural and bureaucratic deficiencies of the Greek administrative and tax-collecting system (Karamessini 2008). Thus, although the government publicly recognized that the tax was unfair, it suggested that it had to be collected in this way because no other organised and up-to-date database of households and the properties in which they live existed in the country. Only the power company’s database was deemed sufficiently accurate!7 This was so despite the fact that all properties have been recorded and taxed based on the Ministry of Finance’s corresponding database for several years.

The inequities in this mechanism of tax collection were numerous. Hence, empty buildings that had not been connected to the power grid during the previous two years or so avoided the tax, as they were not receiving an electricity bill. Furthermore, the tax was calculated based upon flat-rate values (called ‘zone prices’), which ranged between €0.50 and €20 per square metre, depending upon the ‘zone’ (i.e., sub-sectors of cities or towns that are more or less equivalent to zip codes) in which the property was located. These zone prices were determined by the Ministry of Finance, according to the estimated and averaged values of the properties in an area. However, the values are in many cases greatly influenced by a

7 In response to this initial unrest the government tried to reduce this heavy burden for some households. Specifically excluded were jobless consumers who were not eligible for unemployment benefits. The tax was also decreased for the disabled, for families with many children and for the unemployed with insufficient income. In the case of commercial uses, official exemptions from the tax were only allowed for buildings exclusively used for agricultural and industrial manufacturing purposes.

few highly priced properties (e.g., shopping centres, neighbourhoods of the well-off strata, etc.) and other real estate parameters. This choice led to the lumping together into the same zone of neighbourhoods with very different buildings and infrastructures and residents’ incomes. Although the real estate values of the different areas are periodically reassessed, the result of the government’s method of calculating the tax was quite irrational, even when seen under a free market perspective. For example, there was no distinction made in value, and thus the level of tax, between properties that were equal in size and use but located on different floors of the same building or different sub-areas of the same zone. This was despite the fact that real estate values are largely driven by the floor in a building upon which a particular residence is located and by the particularities of a neighbourhood and the amenities it possesses.

Soon after the tax was imposed in early 2011, hundreds of thousands of people began refusing to pay it, either on an individual or on a collective basis. What started out as in-place anti-tax activity, especially in certain working-class or petty-bourgeois localities in Athens and Thessaloniki (Greece’s second-largest city), soon spread across the country. By March 2011 approximately 1.75 million bills were overdue, of which almost 15% had gone beyond the two-and-a-half month late period after which the disconnection of electricity was to be enforced. Numerous forms of civil disobedience soon surfaced. Initially these were spontaneous reactions but they were soon transformed into coordinated actions. Several ‘refusal-to-pay’ initiatives were formed and these started a mass campaign against the tax, with demonstrations often conducted in front of the electricity company’s branches (see Figure 1). Those involved with them published pamphlets guiding citizens on how to react to the threat of their electricity being cut off. A typical response, following relevant guidance from the initiatives, was to pay that part of the electricity bill that was related to power charges and municipal waste collection but to ignore the property tax. This could only be done through ATM banking machines as paying a reduced amount was not officially accepted by the company’s cashiers. Many other



forms of resistance were also used. For example, in many buildings across the country citizens used locks to safeguard their external electricity devices and to hamper those subcontractors authorised by the DEH to cut off their service.

More than 60 municipal administrations across the country, some of them closely connected to left-wing parties, supported such citizen actions. For example, the municipality of Petroupolis, a working-class agglomeration at the western part of Athens’s urban area, actively participated in a case in which 170 citizens won a ruling against having their households’ electricity disconnected. The court recognised citizens’ claims that they were unable to pay the tax imposed through the electricity bills. In New Ionia, a northern suburb of Athens founded during the late 1920s by refugees from Asia Minor, the city council decided to offer technical and legal support to the less-privileged households of the area who were in danger of being disconnected.

The refusal-to-pay initiatives soon morphed from simple non-payment to that of groups of volunteers and electricians, in many cases trans-spatially organised and deliberately coordinating with one another, actively helping citizens to re-connect their electricity in situations wherein their buildings had been cut off due to non-payment. They also organised public demonstrations and common assemblies (see Figure 2). ‘No house without electricity’ soon became

a popular slogan and the movement was actively supported by many members of the lower strata of the population and more passively welcomed by many middle-class people who were against the tax but who were also reluctant to not pay it. A wider consensus that not paying for such a regressive tax is a socially accepted behaviour soon developed.

The powerworkers union (GENOP) had been a strong supporter of the refusal-to-pay movement from its very beginning, although opinions differed amongst its members as to what the scale and the scope of such solidarity should be. Beginning in early 2011 thousands of disconnection orders were issued by DEH. The majority of the company’s technicians, following GENOP’s decision not to disconnect households who had paid their electricity bill but not the tax, refused to proceed with cutting off people’s power. Following directions by government officials,

Figure 1: Photo from a demonstration against the tax (translation: ‘No house without electricity’). The DEH logo is overwritten with the word DEN, meaning ‘I do not’.

Figure 2: Poster calling for a demonstration against the tax (translation of the title: “We say no to increments in the electricity bills and the ‘haratsia’”).

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the DEH decided to outsource the job of cutting off some 20,000 households to private subcontractors. In response, GENOP informed the media and citizens about the private subcontractors who were assigned to implement the disconnections. As a result, one of these subcontractors, Geroh Ltd, responsible for disconnections in the wider urban area of the Greek capital, found itself in a difficult position when activists occupied its administration offices for a few hours in late November 2011 (GENOP 2012).

On November 16, 2011 the union cut the electricity to the Health Ministry building in Athens for four hours to protest the fact that various government departments had not paid their electricity bills – at the time the Ministry owed DEH some €3.8 million whilst the total state debt to DEH was about €141 million (out of a total €856 million in unpaid bills). What was sauce for the goose, union representatives declared, was sauce for the gander. At the same time, the powerworkers’ union decided to protest the tax by proceeding to organise a sit-in occupation ahead of a visit by German Chancellor Angela Merkel of the administration office responsible for issuing disconnection orders. Several days after the occupation started, special forces of the Greek police arrested 15 trade unionists, including GENOP’s President, and charged them with ‘violent obstruction of the proper function of public services’. By January 2012 the power company had issued more than 55,000 orders to cut off people’s electricity as a response to the almost 250,000 instances of households having gone beyond the maximum period beyond which service disconnection was to be enforced. For its part, the government decided to claim the taxes from the electricity company even in those cases where consumers had paid only the share that was related to power consumption and had ignored the tax. In so doing the government placed a heavy burden on the power company’s financial stability, thereby creating fears of an Enron-type energy crisis.8 Having

8 A US energy, commodities and services company based in Houston, Texas, in 2001 Enron filed for bankruptcy after an accounting scandal that would cost investors nearly $11 billion was revealed. Enron had been involved in the 2000-2001 California electricity crisis, in which a shortage of electricity in the state had been caused by market

created a crisis in DEH’s balance sheet, in June 2012 the government decided that it had to prevent the company’s collapse and injected €250 million worth of liquidity into it. As widely acknowledged, DEH’s deteriorating economic situation, then, was the outcome of the state’s decision to treat the company as its tax collecting arm and the consequent refusal by millions of Greek citizens to pay what they considered an unjust tax forced upon them to bail out Europe’s bankers.

In evaluating the resistance to the property tax it is important to recognise that both in-place and trans-spatial solidarity actions were taken. One of the basic achievements of such solidarity was that the tax was delegitimised across the country, even as the government insisted on enforcing the ‘haratsi’ law. In-place action focused on locally-based initiatives and movements that were formed across many neighbourhoods and municipalities, especially in big Greek cities. The pioneering action developed in some neighbourhoods soon spread and triggered similar reactions in cities in many other regions. Thus, trans-spatial solidarity networks expanded across the country, networks that sustained a relatively lengthy and well-synchronised action against disconnections. Experiences and tactics against disconnection were exchanged between different initiatives and localities, leading to frequent knowledge swapping.

According to key informants, the support given by the powerworkers to these solidarity nodes and networks was a deliberate policy to do two things. First, union officials hoped to enhance their current and future claims against privatisation and layoffs at DEH. Second, they sought to re-legitimise themselves in the eyes of a citizenry that frequently treats public workers’ demands as in excess of what they consider to be socially acceptable. Through the union’s support, though, the anti-tax movement was able to achieve some of its goals. For instance, beginning in October 2012 GENOP began a series of rolling 48-hour strikes in protest of the tax and other austerity measures demanded by Greece’s international

manipulations by corporate speculators and possibly illegal activities designed to increase corporate profits.



creditors. The most significant goal achieved was that there was no sizeable degree of disconnection activity allowed until recently, despite the government’s rhetoric that recalcitrant citizens would be forced to pay or face the consequences. On the other hand, the union seemed reluctant to proceed with a more synchronised and systemic disruption across Greece by calling its members to engage in a general refusal to charge and collect the tax and to cut off those who refused to pay. In part this has to do with the fact that some of the power company’s important functions were externalised, as in the case of subcontracting out to private operators the job of cutting off people’s electricity. Most of all, however, many unionists, especially in peripheral cities and regions, felt that despite its uneven and unfair character the tax could not be avoided and, thus, informal support to the very poorest of households threatened with disconnection was the only realistic reaction (GENOP 2012).

Such trans-spatial, though incomplete, civil disobedience put great pressure on the Greek state. Such disobedience was legitimated by the decisions of some Greek courts that disconnecting households that had paid the electricity bill but not the tax was illegal. These decisions were later supported by an opinion of the high court that disconnection due to non-payment of the property tax is unconstitutional. Unfortunately, however, such progressive court decisions were not supported by the Hellenic Council of State (Symvoulio tis Epikrateias, the Supreme Administrative Court of Greece), which decided that, despite its unequal character, the tax implemented was justifiable due to the urgent economic situation in the country.

Under the pressure of civil disobedience, public unrest and court decisions, in January 2012 the government finally adopted a position in which households facing severe economic problems could visit their local tax office and prove their inability to pay so that they might be partially or fully exempted. By the end of 2012 approximately 500,000 property owners had not paid the tax. The total amount of non-paid electricity bills rose from €388 million to €696 million between November 2011 and September 2012. In response, DEH has started to transfer data on

non-payment to the central tax-collecting database of the Greek state, although this procedure is expected to take some time to complete. Once this is completed, though, property owners who refuse to pay will be faced with property confiscation, salary garnishments and rent withholding. In the meantime, as of early 2013 more than 1,000 disconnection orders were being issued daily, of which about 20% are being enforced. However, whereas in the past households that were unable to pay were usually reconnected within a few days, for more than half of these households this is no longer the case and they wait quite long periods of time to regain electricity service.

Steelworkers challenge efforts to resist employment flexibility measures

Few products are as symbolic of the historical development of urban-industrial capitalism as steel. During early phases of industrial expansion the productive dynamism of a country has usually been measured in terms of its steel production capacity, whilst the EU itself originates from the European Coal and Steel Community formed in 1957 by important steel exporting nations. Trade unionism and the formation of class-consciousness also have a strong background in the sector, heavily influenced by the hazardous materials used and the hard working conditions faced by workers therein.

A very competitive global industry, steel manufacturing has witnessed intensive restructuring, technological advancements (e.g., the introduction of continuous casting and Computer-Aided Manufacturing) and rising productivity for many decades now. Due to its technologically intensive character and heavy investments made in updated machinery and fixed capital in general, the productivity of the sector has reached very high levels. As a result, high volumes of steel, when compared to those of the early post-WWII period, are nowadays produced by comparatively small groups of workers. For instance, in the EU employment in the sector has decreased by almost 60% since the early 1980s. This has had important consequences for many working-class communities as firms in the industry historically

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offered relatively well-paid job opportunities for skilled engineers and production supervisors and, to a lesser extent, for blue-collar workers.

China and India are now the world’s major producers and, at the same time, consumers of global steel production. Export activity is so important that it has strongly contributed to the relative dynamism of the economies of Australia and Brazil, both major exporters of iron ore to China, amid a post-2008 global economy that has reeled due to recession. In the EU, Germany leads the way in terms of total production whilst it sits in 7th place globally for steel manufacturing. Some figures for Germany are indicative of the changes being driven by the continuous change in the organic composition of capital in the sector: crude steel output has slightly increased between 1980 and 2011 (at about 5%), whilst employment fell by 69% and productivity per employee rose to 489 tonnes (+222% in comparison to 1980) – this latter figure highlights the degree of the enhanced extraction of relative surplus value due to technological modernisation in the sector.

In the case of the Greek steel industry, the major firm is Greek Steelworks SA (Hellenic Halyvourgia), which was forged through a series of mergers and acquisitions in recent years. The owners, members of a powerful family of Greek capitalists with important investments in other industries, such as shipping and banking, funded Thessaly Steelworks SA in the early 1970s and bought the plant in Aspropyrgos, Attica in 2006. They then merged their company with an old established firm called Hellenic Steelworks. The resultant company has been called the Greek Steelworks SA since then. The firm now operates three plants in Greece, one in Aspropyrgos (just to the northwest of Athens, in Attica’s industrial area) and the two others in the industrial area of Volos (a port-city that was heavily deindustrialised in the late 1980s/ early 1990s), located in the region of Thessaly (see Map 1)

The company has been quite profitable, especially between 2000 and 2007 when the demand for steel increased significantly in both Greece and abroad. It is the second-largest company in terms of sales that is not listed on the Greek stock exchange, amongst the twenty largest of all Greek industries, and the first steel producer on a global scale to have one of its brands (semi-finished billets) included in 2007 in the London Metal Exchange market trading lists. Production in the 400,000 tonne-capacity plant in Aspropyrgos exceeded 266,000 tonnes in 2010 and has increased by 35% since 2009. However, the company was gradually affected by the post-2008 crisis, as both private and public construction activity diminished, leading to a reduction of almost 40% in demand for steel across the country in 2011 (during that same year the firm’s export activity suffered a 15% reduction). In early February 2012, during the strike discussed below, the Ministry of Environment granted the firm official permission for an industrial port development plan in the waterfront adjacent to the 26-hectare plant in Aspropyrgos because the plants in Volos are generating significant activity for the local port.

On 17th November, 2011 a strike erupted at Aspropyrgos’s plant. The strike was in response to management’s imperative to reduce the daily hours of

Map 1: Hellenic Halyvourgia plants in Athens and Volos, together with major industrial areas of Greece



all employees to a maximum of five and to cut wages by 40% as a result of reduced demand for steel. The firm’s management warned that rejection of this plan would force the firm to dismiss 45% of its employees. The plant-based union, however, decided that neither of these proposals were acceptable and organised a two-day strike as a means to press their employer to withdraw them. Soon after the workers went on strike, the company heads significantly escalated the tension by immediately firing 36 workers whilst announcing plans to eventually lay off about 160 of the 400 or so employees of the Aspropyrgos plant. The strike at the Aspropyrgos plant would become one of the longest – if not the longest – strike in Greek history, lasting for 273 days. During it three different Greek administrations successively came to power, during a period (fall 2011 to summer 2012) of great political fluidity, social unrest and tension, with these basically related to the country’s bad financial condition described above and the austerity measures jointly imposed by Greek administrations and the EU and IMF to ‘save’ the country from bankruptcy.

In firing nearly 10% of its workforce Hellenic Halyvourgia became one of the first firms to take advantage of a special provision included in the loan agreement signed between the Greek government and the EU/ IMF in May 2010 in which the government agreed to amend the law to increase the monthly maximum proportion of their workforce that firms could dismiss without government permission from 2% to 5%.9 During the strike, which was immediately turned into an open-ended one by the union, the total number of fired workers gradually rose as the company successively fired workers until they reached a total number of 120.

Important solidarity and networking activity started during the strike’s first few days as a conscious

9 This new threshold was established by Article 74(1) of Act 3863/2010 in July 2010. Prior to this, Law 2874/2000 provided that companies employing 20-199 workers could lay off a maximum of four people per month whilst those employing more than 200 could lay off up to 3% of their workforce (up to a maximum of 30 workers). The government did not oppose the firm’s actions and merely called on the firm to negotiate with its employees.

and spatially-integrated strategy of the union. Successive and mass demonstrations in support of the steelworkers were organised, both in front of the firm’s gates but also in the adjacent locality and in downtown Athens (see Figures 3 & 4). Solidarity actions such as securing letters and statements of support from various unions and institutions were numerous. Many cultural activities were held in front of the plant’s central gate whilst frequent visits by supporting social groups and even schools were organised. Amongst other things, such strong support initiatives were central in sustaining a basic income and food and clothing program for the workers and their families throughout the strike period.

There were several key moments in the articulation of this struggle. At the end of December 2011 a local support strike was organised in the industrial area of the Thriasian Plain, where the plant is located. This strike was a solidarity action taken by the Local Trade Unions Association (LTUA), a secondary-level labour association representing workers of the region, a region which is amongst the top-five industrial areas in Greece and one characterized by active Greek and immigrant working-class populations.10 In mid-January 2012 another support strike was organised, this time on a wider scale – it included the whole industrial-urban area of Attica. This strike was organised by all the LTUAs based in Attica. Yet these strikes were not sufficient to undermine the employer’s resolve. Moreover, they did not attract participation on the part of the majority of local workers. This reluctance probably stems from two chronic and interrelated problems: the effects of de-industrialisation on labour agency and class consciousness, and the history of de-unionisation in the region, which has led the labour unions to fear engaging in ‘risky’ behaviour like strikes. Also, it should be noted that the steelworkers’ struggle coincided with the above-described period of tension, during which the successive bailout packages, bankruptcy threats and general strikes were the major determinants of the political agenda. Nevertheless, there were several transnational declarations of support expressed by many unions in other counties and some

10 It plays host to some of Greece’s major industrial facilities, including its largest oil refineries.

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international organisations (e.g., the International Metalworkers’ Federation, a Global Union Federation based in Geneva, Switzerland). Demonstrations were also organised in front of the Greek embassies in Melbourne and London.

Despite these actions, during the nine-and-a-half months of the strike management not only remained rigid in its initial plans to reduce working hours but it also kept firing workers. Managers then went a step further by accusing the union and its supporters of wanting the plant to close. This rhetoric was in one way or another then adopted by the Greek Ministry of Employment, despite its official calls that a ‘decent’ compromise respecting workers’ rights be found. Following this, a few weeks before the strike was broken by police intervention the company announced its plans to stop all production in Aspropyrgos. The union, however, kept pushing for a viable solution and backed away from some of its initial claims, declaring that workers would go back to work if further dismissals stopped and if the company was willing to negotiate a plan for gradual reinstatement of those fired.

Early on the morning of July 20, 2012 the Greek police force’s riot squad began a special operation against the steelworkers and raided the plant. This action followed guidelines set out by the Prosecutor General, who had issued a warrant for the strike’s immediate termination. Prime Minister Samaras himself had conversed with the Prosecutor a few hours before the police intervention and ordered him to proceed immediately. The police arrested six workers who had been on the night picket line and surrounded the gates of the plant, refusing to allow anyone to enter a restricted zone established about 150 metres around it. A strict monitoring process began, allowing members of the headquarters and administrative departments, who were more or less against the strike, to return back to work but keeping more militant workers out of the plant. Gradually, though, the productive units also returned to work, and ‘regularity’ was again established in the firm.

Nevertheless, the ultimate reason the struggle was terminated was not related to force and police

repression, as widely acknowledged by several of the key informants interviewed. Rather, despite workers’ militancy and important trans-spatial activity, the union fell short when it came to jumping through an important solidarity hoop – that of gaining the support and active participation of their colleagues employed in the other two Greek Steelworks, located in Volos, who belong to a different trade union (there are two different unions in the firm, one representing Aspropyrgos and the other representing all of the Volos plants’ workers). Though specific effort was directed to this goal, the trade union in Volos remained reluctant to support and go on strike to support the claims of the workers at Aspropyrgos. A closer look at this seemingly strange reaction shows that two divergent strategies were adopted by the two different local unions representing workers at the same firm. In fact, a few months before workers in Aspropyrgos began their strike the firm had used the argument of falling demand to announce an almost identical program of reduction in working hours, coupled to decreased wages, to the employees in Volos. That reduction plan was accepted by the employees’ union in Volos because of, on the one hand, fears that without doing so the plant would close and, on the other, hopes that demand, and thus wages and working hours, would soon recover.

Workers in Aspropyrgos, however, had actively resisted such changes when it was their turn to decide. During the long strike they tried several times to persuade their colleagues’ to act. For example, they organised three demonstrations in front of the Volos plants, traveling all the way there (some 350 kilometres). Though their physical movement was not restricted by the police in the way in which British law enforcement had limited the movement of pickets during the miners’ strike of 1984 as a way to stop that strike spreading geographically (see Blomley 1994), only a small group of the steelworkers had the ability to travel to Volos due to the economic deprivation that their strike was imposing upon participants. Despite all of this, these demonstrations, which took the form of an effort to unify spatially workers at all of the firm’s plants, were quite well supported by many local unionists, employees for other workplaces, students



and activists. Workers in Volos, however, remained passive.

Workers in Aspropyrgos began opposing their employer’s plans by starting a campaign focused upon all employees and trade unions in the wider area of Volos. This was designed to reveal the common interests between metalworkers and all employees, as much among different plants and/or firms as across cities in Greece. Their efforts, though, proved largely fruitless. The union in Volos’s plants, though it sought to avoid antagonising the Aspropyrgos workers, remained passive by declaring that it could not go on strike due to the limited prospects for its success. At the same time, however, the General Assembly of Volos’s LTUA, closely related as it is to the social democratic party in power at that time and representing an area where labour militancy is less deeply rooted than it is in Athens, adopted a more aggressive stance by announcing that Aspopyrgos’s unionists and their ‘radical supporters’ were not welcome in Volos because they supposedly threatened local employment and prosperity. The same obstacle occurred with the steelworkers’ secondary-level union, the Panhellenic Association of Metal Workers. The latter took no important action during the strike, although Aspropyrgos’s workers called many times for a 24-hour solidarity strike in all metal and steel firms across the country.

Ironically, Greek Steelworks employees in Volos retained their wages and working patterns during most of the time that Aspropyrgos was on strike. This was not really a tactical move on the part of the employer to prevent the emergence of synchronised action and so to divide the workers by preventing them from uniting around a common set of grievances (loss of hours and wages). Rather, it resulted from the fact that from the company’s point of view much of the productive capacity that was being lost due to the strike in Aspropyrgos had to be regained through increasing productivity in Volos. Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, soon after the strike stopped, reduced work and payment was re-introduced into the other plants in the firm’s network. Significantly, then, workers in Volos treated the strike by their co-

workers in Aspropyrgos as both a threat to their own jobs and a chance to regain their full-time working status. As the president of the Aspropyrgos union, Giorgos Sifonios, has put it: “if the workers in the Volos plant had decided to support us and go on strike then all of our claims would have been accepted by the managers, and the fired workers would have returned back to work in less than a week’s time”.

Such an anti-upscaling reaction is, it turns out, quite common in the history of steelworker movements. Thus Hudson and Sadler (1983), who studied the restructuring of the European steel industry in the early 1980s, found that the early trans-spatial class solidarity that workers developed across various plants in the UK and France to defend their jobs in the face of plans to rationalise the industry was later replaced with a spatially atomistic set of campaigns focused upon ‘defending jobs in our community by ensuring they are lost elsewhere’. In the case of the steelworkers in the Volos plant, though, passivity was

Figures 3&4: images of the steelworkers’ struggle

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stronger from the very beginning and fighting that battle had never been an option.

Discussing the potential and shortcomings of labour’s agency from a Southern EU perspective

The two cases above present some important insights that could serve as the basis for several theoretical and political conclusions. These may be divided into the following aspects: i) the role of local and trans-local solidarity and networking; ii) the role played by the fragmentation of capital and the state policies the workers had to oppose; and iii) the temporality and timing of the struggle. Our discussion is not meant to imply that these two cases are comparable, as they are quite different from one another in that the powerworkers expressed solidarity with the wider public movement developed against the new property tax whilst steelworkers tried to develop solidarity with their colleagues and the wider working class in order to protect their work. Rather, what we want to do here is to explore some of the spatial aspects of these two disputes in which different groups of workers are seeking to challenge the austerity measures being imposed upon them as the solution to crises of capital accumulation.

In the steelworkers’ case, the technology-intensive character of production, the demand fluctuations and the national and international prospects for the sector heavily influenced Greek Steelworks SA’s strategy. Big, export-orientated and technologically advanced firms, even if not of a multinational character, frequently adopt trans-national restructuring strategies and they are more or less able to impose these strategies upon employees (McGrath-Champ 1999). The rapidly changing division of labour and spatial fluidity of investments in the sector can strongly affect worker prospects for victory (Harvey 2006). Moreover, along with the shipping industry, banking and the construction sector, the capital fragment that the firm represents belongs to the core of the Greek capitalist class which, despite its secondary position within the global hierarchy of capitalism, has important influences throughout the EU and beyond. Greek Steelworks not only had certain degrees of freedom in

respect to such factors, but also gained lost capacity by putting employees in the two remaining plants back to full-time work again. This helps explain the firm’s hardnosed attitude towards the workers’ claims.

On the other hand, powerworkers work in a state-regulated, though semi-privatised, industry that provides a good deal of wider social significance and they positively responded to calls for solidarity action against state actions imposed through their company. Through such action their own claims (e.g., against further privatisation of the company) gained wider support. In other words, they managed to enhance their current and future claims against privatisation, cutbacks and firings at DEH, whilst re-legitimising themselves in the eyes of a citizenry that often treats public workers’ demands as being excessive. This was an important goal for them, for the power sector has been heavily privatised during the past two decades or so and, sooner or later, at least some powerworkers will have to face layoffs and the introduction of labour practices designed to make them more ‘flexible’, practices that many other steelworkers are already experiencing. In the steelworkers’ case, then, the development of a trans-spatial solidarity network had been a quite conscious union policy since the struggle had started. The left-orientated unions, institutions, parties and individual employees had actively sought to expand their actions spatially throughout the country or even internationally to overcome the barriers they would face if such actions remained confined to the localities in which they had started. Thus the restraints that ‘staying local’ can impose upon a struggle were opposed through active trans-spatial networking, up-scaling efforts and attempts to develop solidarity across space (Herod 2010).

Both case studies show that workers had a certain degree of effectiveness as they combined in place and across space types of struggle, with the latter being of greater importance in the effort to re-scale the respective struggles. Yet, in the case of powerworkers this re-scaling was much easier to achieve as it was based upon a wide popular unrest against the tax. In many such instances, though, the solid base upon which such combination may flourish is the unity



and militancy of the workers expressed both on an individual and a collective basis (Coe and Lier 2011).

The temporality and timing of actions were also factors that strongly affected the prospects for workers to win their struggles. Both the steelworkers and the powerworkers were engaged in disputes at moments of significant political tension where a wide-ranging, though spatially uneven, devaluation within the Greek economy had started to unfold and a general attack against workers’ living status was being implemented. In both cases agency was constrained by what was going on during the moments of action, especially the financial (in)stability which, within the ‘rational’ discourse of ‘market reality’, serves to make all workers’ claims sound unrealistic (Tufts and Savage 2009; Herod 2010).

Whereas for the powerworkers their actions in one area would not have had negative impacts on powerworkers elsewhere, for steelworkers their levels of attachment to the places in which they live and work meant that they chose to defend their communities – to put spatial interests over class ones – in both Attica and Volos, if in different ways. The local embeddedness of firms’ workers was important in both cities where Greek Steelworks plants are located but had completely different impacts upon their practice. The former, living in a big, urban-industrial area with a strong labour movement tradition, chose struggle against their employer’s imperatives whilst the latter, located in a peripheral city where the population is smaller and imbued with a less confrontationalist ideology, compromised. Although both thought that they were doing the best for preserving their families’ reproduction within the locality in which they live, how they chose to do so was quite different and shaped by the spatial context within which they found themselves.

Finally, both cases should be seen within the framework of the restructuring of the Greek and other Southern EU capitalisms which are losing their competitive place within the unequal hierarchy of the EU and global capitalism (Sakellaropoulos 2010). They highlight the chronic and structural weaknesses of

the Greek labour movement (Michael-Matsas 2010). In addition to questions about the willingness of individual employees to protest, struggles that started amid the crisis and the politically driven devaluation that followed, as was the case with these two examined here, had to face extra obstacles. One of these was the inability of workers to claim their employment rights or oppose the austerity measures amid a period of generalised attack on the rights and privileges of the collective worker. Striving to retain particular jobs and working rights whilst thousands of jobs are lost, hundreds of firms close, and even more workers accept severe devaluation in terms of their direct salaries or welfare provisions was easily presented as being ‘selfish’, which made it difficult for the steelworkers in particular to gain the sympathy of many Greeks who were experiencing similar – or worse – problems. This was in contrast to the situation of the powerworkers, who were seen as engaging in a less self-interested struggle. The result is that in the face of such a tremendous upheaval the labour movement seems weak in trying to defend workers’ rights, especially in countries like Greece. De-unionisation, widespread acceptance of the rhetoric about the need for competitiveness and social dialogue, and paternalism on behalf of the political parties (even those that retain a class-orientated policy and practice) are all factors that have left their negative imprint upon the movement’s ‘exhausted body’. The fragmentation within production as well as across space, taking the form of spatial competition that divides unionised workers who supposedly have a common outlook expressed by their union, is also important, as seen in the steelworkers’ case.

It is not the first time that workers in a plant have denied trans-local action and solidarity to their colleagues in another region, and such action (or passiveness) of workers in one locality is usually harmful for the interests of their co-workers in another place. If organising over space fails and up-scaling is prevented, then segmentation prevails and unity is dismantled. This is the main reason why solidarity actions in support of wider claims, such as the one organised by the powerworkers, must be a conscious and spatially-deliberate policy of the labour movement if its own rights are to be protected.

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Resisting Austerity: The Case of Greece’s Powerworkers and Steelworkers

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