Greece braced for strikes over planned move to limit industrial action | World news | The Guardian

Unions promise walkouts as MPs prepare to vote on measures attached to 2015 bailout

Alexis Tsipras’s leftist-led government has agreed that unions will have to have much larger quorums for strikes to be called. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Greece is braced for industrial action as its MPs prepare to vote on implementing some of the most politically sensitive measures attached to its 2015 bailout.

On Monday, MPs will be called to endorse a “multi-bill” of emergency reforms that includes contentious legislation to limit industrial action. Unionists have reacted with a barrage of strikes, with more work stoppages and walkouts promised.

“These were rights won with sweat and blood more than three decades ago,” Odysseus Trivalas, the president of the union of public sector workers, told the Guardian. “Banks, industrialists and foreign investors want to deny us them. We won’t make it easy. We will take to the streets.”

In the nearly nine years since its descent into economic crisis, an estimated 50 general strikes have been held in Greece with workers viewing industrial action as sacrosanct. Under the new law, Alexis Tsipras’s leftist-led government has agreed that unions will have to have much larger quorums to enable strikes to be called.

“Effectively it will be impossible for workers in factories to have their voice heard,” said Trivalas. “They keep saying Greece is turning a corner, that this will help growth, but the reality is the little man won’t feel it in his pocket for another 20 years. The law is totally undemocratic, a form of modern slavery.”

Communist-affiliated trade unionists stormed the labour ministry last week, prising open metal shutters with knives and crowbars before confronting the minister, Effie Achtsioglou, in her eighth-floor office.

The slight 32-year-old was visibly shaken as protesters, shouting: “Shame on you,” demanded she withdraw the measure. A banner bearing the words “Hands off strikes, it’s a labour right” was hung from the building’s facade.

In addition to the strike clampdown, the multi-purpose bill also foresees properties belonging to bad debt holders being auctioned online. This is essential, creditors say, if Greece’s large level of non-performing bank loans is also to be dealt with. Both measures have been hugely unsettling for governing leftists, many of whom started off in the trade union movement.

About 100 reforms, known as “prior actions”, are contained in the bill being debated. Although they are ultimately expected to be passed, Tsipras, the prime minister, has been forced to prevail on Syriza cadres to see the bigger picture: that, once the measures are approved, Greece will be able to complete a compliance review that will release more emergency funds before its third, and hopefully last, bailout programme expires in August.

Holding his first cabinet meeting of the year last week, the leader announced that the country was in the “final stretch” of international supervision – surveillance ushered in with its first €120bn (£107bn) economic adjustment programme in May 2010.

“A lot of Syriza MPs are upset because these measures hurt their leftwing ideology and feelings,” said the political analyst Pantelis Kapsis.

The Greek government is hoping to make a “clean exit” from creditor oversight, calculating that a successful compliance review will facilitate market forays that will allow the country to build a cash buffer before its €86bn bailout – orchestrated by the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank – officially ends.

Excluded from capital markets since the outbreak of the crisis, Greece has been unable to refinance a debt load that at about €320bn, or 180% of GDP, is by far the highest in the EU.

For Tsipras, personally, regaining economic independence has become essential to his own political survival given Syriza’s dramatic slide in popularity under the weight of austerity measures. On Sunday, Athens was told clearly that international monitoring was unlikely to end soon. Debt relief, said Thomas Wieser, the outgoing Euro Working Group chief and a central player in the Greek debt drama, was only likely only if Athens pushed through further reforms once its bailout formally ends.