Greece

By Orla Dwyer - The Conversation, February 5, 2024

From Berlin and Paris, to Brussels and Bucharest, European farmers have driven their tractors to the streets in protest over recent weeks. 

According to reports, these agricultural protesters from across the European Union have a series of concerns, including competition from cheaper imports, rising costs of energy and fertiliser, and environmental rules. 

Farmers’ groups in countries including Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Poland and Romania have all been protesting over the past couple of months. 

The UK’s Sunday Telegraph has tried to frame the protests as a “net-zero revolt” with several other media outlets saying the farmers have been rallying against climate or “green” rules. 

Carbon Brief has analysed the key demands from farmer groups in seven countries to determine how they are related to greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, biodiversity or conservation. 

The findings show that many of the issues farmers are raising are directly and indirectly related to these issues. But some are not related at all. Several are based on policy measures that have not yet taken effect, such as the EU’s nature restoration law and a South American trade agreement. 

By Katie Myers - Grist, August 1, 2023

The heatwave enveloping much of the world is so deadly that, in Europe, it has acquired two hellish mythical names: Cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards Hades, and Charon, the man who, legend has it, ferries the dead to the afterlife.

Workers are taking a stand against the brutal conditions, using walkouts, strikes, and protests to call attention to the outsize danger the heat poses to the people who must work outdoors or in conditions where air condition isn’t available. The ongoing threat has taken the lives of people, from a construction worker in the Italian city of Lodi to farmworkers in Florida, and letter carriers in Texas. 

The organizing efforts started in Greece, where workers in the tourism industry — which accounts for 20% of the country’s GDP — are chafing under the strain. Athens’s most famous archaeological site, the Acropolis, closed for a few days earlier this month, but even as the government reopened it, temperatures continued soaring to 111 degrees Fahrenheit. The Acropolis’s staff, which is unionized through the Panhellenic Union for the Guarding of Antiquities voted to strike during the hottest four hours of each day.

By Justin Mikulka - DeSmog, March 21, 2023

On February 25, Greece experienced its deadliest rail disaster ever when a freight train ran headlong into a passenger train coming towards it on the same track, killing 57 people. This tragic accident, near the city of Larissa, occurred just weeks after the East Palestine, Ohio rail disaster, and while the outcomes are different, the root cause is the same: corporate greed and deregulation. 

While two trains colliding on the same tracks might seem unfathomable to Americans, it shouldn’t be. A similar accident occurred in Texas in 2016, a year after the U.S. rail industry refused to meet a Congressionally mandated deadline for installing a safety system called positive train control, which would have prevented the accident.

Threatened with a rail shutdown, Congress buckled and gave the industry an extra three years to install the safety system, with the option for an extension until the end of 2020. On December 29, 2020, the Federal Railroad Administration announced that positive train control was finally installed on all of the required rail lines. 

As DeSmog has reported, the U.S. rail industry has lobbied against the requirement to install positive train control since 1970. In fact, one rail lobbyist received an award for being “part of a successful push for a congressional agreement to extend a deadline for automated trains on most of the nation’s railways.” The National Transportation Safety Board first recommended positive train control in 1970 after two Penn Central commuter trains collided head-on near Darien, Connecticut, the previous year. Four people were killed and 43 were injured.

By anonymous - leaflet, March 2023

For a decade now, VIOME has been the only self-managed factory in Greece, where workers control the production process. It is a node in the ongoing global struggle for rebellious dignity against the capitalist onslaught that sweeps across the planet: from Rojava to Chiapas, from the Yellow Vests in France to Black Lives Matter in the USA, from the occupied factories in Argentina to the landless movements in Brazil and South Africa, from the uprisings in Iran and Chile to struggles everywhere against the privatization of the commons and the pillaging of nature.

Ten years ago, VIOME workers started producing eco-friendly cleaning products in the factory that their bosses had abandoned. Against the attacks of the state and capital, VIOME fought back and survived thanks to the support of a huge wave of solidarity that was expressed on a global scale.

The occupied factory became a crucial space for struggle, creation, and culture: autonomous markets, worker coordination from recovered factories, and cooperative projects from all over the world, the first workers' clinic in Greece, festivals, visual interventions, theatrical performances, film screenings, concerts, political discussions, solidarity actions for refugees and immigrants.

By staff - IndustriALL Global Union, March 3, 2022

On 26 February, three Greek unions organized a massive demonstration and march to the Greek Parliament in Syntagma Square to protest layoffs at Kavala Oil and other industrial sites.

The demonstration was organized by the Pan-Hellenic Energy Federation (PEF), the Pan-Hellenic Federation of Metal Workers (POEM) and the Federation of Chemical Industry workers of Greece (OEXBE). PEF and POEM are affiliates of IndustriALL Global Union and industriAll European Trade Union.

The unions were protesting the layoff of 122 workers at Kavala Oil, layoffs at LARCO, the state-owned ferro-nickel production company, and the growing use of temporary contracts at Kavala Fertilizers.

Kavala Oil operates the only oil field in Greece, and is owned by London-listed Energean. The company received €100 million of EU Covid support – taxpayers’ money - as part of the State Aid Temporary Framework to support and maintain employment during the pandemic. PEF and its affiliate, the Kavala Oil Workers’ Union, supported the proposal to finance the company on the condition that workers’ rights be respected.

Instead, the company launched a restructuring programme in April 2021, laying off 40 workers and moving another 40 from permanent to contract positions. The company also announced €6 million cuts in salaries and allowances.

More workers have subsequently been laid off, bringing the current total to 122.

In 2021, industriAll Europe wrote to the European Commmission, and a Greek MEP from the Left group raised the issue in the European Parliament. In December, workers occupied the facility. The occupation was broken by riot police on 21 December, with 17 arrests. No charges were filed and the workers were released. On 1 January, the workers went on strike.

By Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler - Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler, August 18, 2020

By various - Transnational Institute - June 2018

Over several sunny days in June 2018, a diverse group of 60 activists and researchers from 30 countries convened for a multi-day meeting to discuss the collective building of post-capitalist futures. The meeting provided the opportunity for a rich exchange of perspectives and experiences, as well as deep discussion and debate. The goal of the meeting was not to achieve consensus both an impossible and unnecessary endeavour but rather to stimulate mutual learning, challenge one another and advance analyses.

One session of the meeting – Transformative Cities – was held not as a closed discussion but as a public event attended by 300 people at which prominent activists and academics engaged with municipal leaders and politicians on the role cities can play in building post-capitalist futures.

In line with the meeting, this report does not intend to advance one line of analysis, but rather summarise some of the key ideas and issues discussed and debated (not necessarily in the order they were articulated). To summarise necessarily means to leave things out. It would be impossible to fully capture the incredible richness of the discussion that took place, but hopefully this report provides a valuable sketch.

Read the report (PDF).

Originally posted by Agência de Notícias Anarquistas (A.N.A.) translated by Earth First! Journal staff - July 30, 2017

In this post we touch on the imminent ecological destruction of the island of Samothrace, with the construction of two wind farms composed of thirty-nine giant aerogenerators. What follows is a related statement of initiative titled “Samothrace against the construction of the wind farm” by inhabitants of the island.

A few days ago we learned that in Samothrace, Anemómetra and Luludi (Flor), on the summit of the second highest mountain in the island after Saos, three and thirty-six wind turbines were installed respectively. That is, our island will become an industry of renewable energy sources.

The big investors Bóbolas and Kopeluzos, who act as mediators of the French and German energy colossi who have dozens of nuclear power stations in these countries, are trying to irreversibly destroy our mountain of archaic vegetation and unique beauty, taking advantage of laws approved in 2014 and 2015, tailored to their needs.

To make them understand the size of the catastrophe, we say that for the installation of the giant wind turbines of 90 meters, they will have to open paths of 30 or 40 meters wide up to the peaks. Once the paths are made, they will build the bases of the thirty-nine wind turbines. Each of them will weigh 1.3 tons of cement, that is, they will put 47 tons of cement on the mountain tops. This means the death of all the mountain forests, which are already suffering from excessive grazing for many years. The franked paths will pave the way for the illegal cutting of the trees from the mountain woods.

Also, due to the installation of these aerogenerators embedded in the body of the mountain, the aquifers will be affected, directly and irreversibly, since the precipitation water will not be able to penetrate the earth. This will disturb and change the microclimate of the island, and will have consequences for all its aquatic wealth. In addition, from the places where the wind turbines will be installed, a monstrous network of high-voltage electricity pillars will reach the coast, to the sea. These pillars are contaminants, radiating radioactivity, and will also constitute fires.

Lastly, the same story elsewhere in the territory of the Greek state, for example in Apopigad of Chania, Crete, has shown that the installation of wind turbines is the pretext for the creation of hybrid (complex) plants after conducting environmental studies At least suspect and of questionable reliability, in order to exploit the mountain’s aquatic resources, as these companies will aim to suck all the island’s energy resources.

And when we talk about hybrid plants, we mean wind plants, hydroelectric plants, motorized pump groups and drilling all over the mountain, in other words, a huge pool of water made to save the environment with another source of renewable energy. Green development, or the way to hell, is paved with good intentions.

It must be made absolutely clear that we are obviously in favor of wind and solar energy, and it does not leave us indifferent to the fact that Florina and Ptolemaida are being sacrificed for the sake of lignite-based energy production. The term, however, green development is by contradictory and deceptive antonomasia. Because development will be green. What they mean by this term, distorting reality and taking away its meaning, is the increasingly intensive exploitation of all the resources that have this place, disregarding the environmental consequences and local societies.

Neither will they offer jobs to the residents, since their teams are specialized and are generally from the country where the wind turbines were manufactured, namely France and Germany. Behind the beautiful words are hidden very profitable businesses, to the detriment of nature, whose purposes are the exploitation of raw materials and humans.