Abstract
The recent global economic crisis and the concomitant austerity policy responses exacerbated the position of organized labor, both in terms of inequality in resource allocation and ideological backlash consolidated in the rise of reactionary politics. Resting upon a variety of data (ethnography, administrative data, collective agreements, press material) collected from Greek shipbuilding and ship repairing industry, we reconstruct a case of radical political unionism dealt with employer hostility and escalating far right violence. Despite the inconsistencies noticed, the Trade Union of Metal Workers of Attica and the Shipbuilding Industry of Greece (TUMW) demonstrated an exemplary resilience as regards far right counter-hegemonic practices. However vivid the far right activism might appear, it proved incapable of shaping a nationalist labor union that would dislocate TUMW. This paper tells the story of a battle against social injustice and right-wing extremism and its wider importance for the Greek and global labor movement.
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Notes
See for example the following excerpt from GD website: “Between these two absolutely material sides of the same Zionist coin, internationalism-Marxism-Socialism and globalized Capitalism-Neoliberalism, there is Nationalism. [...] This kind of Nationalism which is meritocratic, just, truly humanistic and has the realistic vision of a powerful state in the service of the whole nation” (cited in Koronaiou and Sakellariou 2013).
Most of the quantitative indications about the current zone’s demographic characteristics and unionization have been analyzed and processed during G. Bithymitris’s post-doctoral research titled “Working-class Identity Under Negotiation: The Case of West Piraeus.” The research has received a grant from the State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) as part of the Action “Support for Postdoctoral Researchers,” OP “Development of human resources, education and lifelong learning” with priority axes 6, 8, 9, co-funded by the European Social Fund (ESF) and the Greek State. More details can be found in Bithymitris and Koustenis (forthcoming).
For most of our informants, both the contractors and the ship owners are perceived as exploitative and demanding employers that have few inhibitions when it comes to profit-making: “They (the zone employers) are tough, just like our work,” says one zone worker. According to another one: “Even when we had a full workload, they were making extreme money. And even in those times they were trying to harm you, to steal your insurance benefit or whatever.”
The average income of the zone workers that took part in the vocational training program of 2015 amounted to 9609 EUR annually (based on incomes declared in 2014), while according to the official data of the Greek Ministry of Finance the national average annual income amounted to 12,411 EUR (based on incomes declared in 2014). This gap reflects the severe income losses experienced by the zone workers after a period of deep recession in shipbuilding and ship repair industry (2010–2015). The suspension of the collective agreements (2011/2012) and the predominance of individual contracts exacerbated the decline of the labor share. On the other hand, the recent collective agreement of 2017 had a mild recovering effect, particularly when compared with other sub-sectors of the Greek metal sector. To sum up, the zone workforce is still relatively well-paid—and the employers keep complaining about this fact—but this is conditional to the non-standard subcontracting nature of the local employment regime. Therefore, workers’ incomes depended upon the level of the economic activity. In periods of economic inactivity, the effects of underemployment on the zone workers’ income are disproportionately negative.
We should not ignore the power asymmetries though that Spyridakis (2017) has noticed in the relationships between the zone workers and the union. The instrumentalization of this relationship is just one of the challenges that TUMW should confront in the framework of the ongoing battles for hegemony
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Bithymitris, G., Spyridakis, M. Union radicalism versus the nationalist upsurge: the case of Greek shipbuilding workers. Dialect Anthropol 44, 121–135 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-020-09582-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-020-09582-6