The experience of grassroots syndicalism in Greece: workplace restructuring and the role of traditional trade unions in the tertiary sector (original) (raw)

Abstract

The years after 2008 were marked by a burgeoning of grassroots syndicalism in Greece. Following the events of December 2008, and their seriously overlooked aspect of worker-oriented action and organizing, a great part of the anarchist and extreme left milieu turned to workplace syndicalism as its principal praxis. Drawing from the experience of previous attempts to organize precarious workers, especially in the courier service, these groups and individuals proposed an aggressive, non-institutional syndicalism, based on collective action for the consolidation of individual workplace victories, with the ultimate aim of gaining workers rights for ‘new’ types of workers, marginalized by state-sanctioned trade unions. In the wake of the austerity measures imposed by the Troika, a series of worker’s rights have been irreversibly revoked, leaving little space for the shop-floor negotiation that these collectives have relied upon until now. At the same time, the importance of fighting over small material victories at the workplace becomes a last bastion of resistance against work restructuring, especially in the private sector. ; This presentation attempts a genealogy of novel forms of syndicalism in Greece, examining them within recent ‘circles of struggle’, as an effect of three not necessarily interrelated processes: the crisis of state-sanctioned trade unions as mediators between workers’ interests and capital, especially as part of the socialist arrangement; the proliferation of low-wage service jobs in the last part of the 90s – as part of the neoliberal regulation of work in late capitalism; and the radicalization of younger generations, especially through the no-global movement of 2003, the student protests of 2006 and its culmination in the events of December 2008.

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