PAME calls for mobilizations on September 13, the class trade unions at the offices of electricity suppliers demanding: Cheap electricity for all the people!
The lies are over! No family should be cold in their own home. No student to freeze to death during in classroom. No one to have to exercise in Antarctic conditions. We won’t let them, and we know how. The strengthening of our organization, the massing of our unions, the development of the struggle, is our strength.
What we have experienced in the last year is continuous and rapid increases in the price of energy, with the result that electricity, gas and oil have become very expensive luxury goods. The family budget has been ‘blown out’. Combined with the exorbitant increases in housing and consumer goods, workers look in their wallets ten days after being paid and find only their ID cards.
We’re tired of hearing from current and former government officials that this winter is going to be tough. But they don’t tell us for whom! How difficult will this winter be for the Greek energy groups whose profitability is breaking records by acieving record profits the last 6 months?
They do care for our lives. They talk about what is coming to scare us. To keep us from reacting. To keep taking from buckets of money every month in taxes, which then the government can generously give it to the energy conglomerates, who collect the bills. Instead of building hospitals and schools, instead of anti-flood projects that when it rains we need a boat, the people’s money is handed over to the parasites that own the energy conglomerates.
They even go so far as to ask the people, without shame, in order not to freeze from the cold, to get through the winter with blankets. To become ‘responsible’ and contribute to the effort to reduce consumption, as if before the workers were consuming recklessly because they had money to spare.
Energy increases are not created out of thin air. No evil has suddenly befallen us, nor is the alleged inefficiency of the government to blame. The blame for the problems we are experiencing has a name and it is the strategy to support the profits of the capital. This has been served by all the governments that have ‘liberalised’ the electricity and gas markets, including through the privatisations that preceded them. Who supported the de-lignification and deprived the country’s energy mix of a domestic and cheap energy source. Which contributed to the creation of the energy stock exchange, the replacement of ‘conventional’ forms of energy with renewable forms of energy that we pay for in gold. We even pay for their war in Ukraine through our electric bills.
The government and the parties that ruled to stop the fairy tales about a supposedly ‘European solution’. With their allies in the European Union they have made a deal. The ‘European Green Deal’ commitment directive brings rapid increases in fossil fuel taxes. On natural gas it provides for a 350% tax increase by 2023 and 500% by 2033, for electricity taxation it brings “automatic indexation”.
That is why workers have no solutions to expect from the EU, the governments and their notorious plans. If we do, we will be paying the bill for all our lives. Now more than ever we need to trust our own strength, to organise our fightback. To make housing, energy, water, goods accessible to anyone who needs them, not expensive commodities as they are today.
We demand.
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Abolition of the Special Consumption Tax and VAT on oil, petrol, gas and electricity.
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Immediately stop power cuts to families unable to pay for it.
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Reconnect the electricity to homes that was cut with the only condition being an agreement to settle debts with no advance payment and several low instalments to pay the bills.
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No cut of electricity and gas supply to schools
Greece – September 13 Action Day for Cheap Electricity for the People!
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Source: PAME