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GREEK trade unions have called a general strike for tomorrow as parliament considers European Union-dictated cuts stretching into the next decade.
MPs began a four-day debate yesterday on whether to submit to the latest round of Brussels austerity demands in return for the banking bailout agreed in 2015.
The proposed measures include additional pension cuts in 2019 and income tax rises in 2020, along with further attacks on workers’ rights and social security and declaring Sunday a work day.
If MPs do not agree, the “troika” of international creditors will cancel the country’s third bailout since 2010 — most of which will go to other eurozone countries as repayments on dodgy debts.
General Confederation of Greek Workers president Yiannis Panagopoulos, one of those leading the strike, said Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s government had betrayed voters.
“The government is now implementing the measures that it once protested against,” he said. “They have surrendered to everything.
“We have carried out dozens of general strikes during the bailout period,” he said. “Clearly, unions alone cannot solve the country’s major economic and social problems, but this is to protest against and expose what is happening.”
Communist union federation Pame will also join the strike against what they called the “fourth memorandum, which will burden the working class.”
The latest demands will mean “new privileges and funding to the big business groups, new misery for the workers,” Pame said.
Buses in Greece’s second city Thessaloniki were delayed by a dispute yesterday after drivers went unpaid. Ferry crews will strike today and tomorrow.
