Greece stopped by 24-hour general strike over cost of living
Greece stopped by 24-hour general strike over cost of living
Greece ground to a halt as a general strike stopped trains, ships and other transport around the country. Unions have called for the government to raise wages and do more to combat high inflation.
Summary
A 24-hour general strike in Greece on Wednesday shut down transport, schools, and government offices as workers protested high living costs.
Unions are demanding a 10% pay raise and the return of holiday bonuses cut during Greece’s financial crisis.
They accuse Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis of not doing enough to tackle inflation, despite recent minimum wage increases.
Hospitals operated on emergency staff, while protests and marches were planned.
Many say wages have not kept up with the rising costs of energy, food, and rent.
That's so much smarter than voting for far right shitstains to 'protest'. Would love to see this all over Europe instead of the rise of fascism.
The one tool Americans refuse to use.
Apparently we haven't been fucked enough yet. I'm honestly curious how low we will go. I suspect there is no bottom and Americans are just flesh bags trained to seek out meat grinders.
Refuse? This was called by unions. In the US, that kind of union activity is illegal. What system do you think we can use in the US to call for a general strike that enough people would 1) be aware of the strike 2) agree with the need for a strike and 3) be able to participate without harming their livelihoods? Cause in Greece, the answer for all three was unions. Here in the states... I don't know if anything is setup for that. Even reaching enough people to begin with would be tough.
Like, be rightly angry at the laws in the US that make this nigh impossible, maybe raise awareness, but don't blame the damn victims.
The first problem is the polarisation. If people that are perceived to be Democrats call out a general strike, 50 percent won’t participate. Vice versa if perceived GOP does this. The polarisation and politicisation of every topic is what stops you from organising effectively.
Ha, like either of them would ever do that
It's not a both-sides thing. The right hates the left for identitarian reasons. We are the "other" and must always be hated. If the left takes a position, the right will oppose it, even if they supported it first. The left hates the right for their ideological reasons that would be largely irrelevant if the right actually called a general strike.
...which is very much by design. The "Ownership Class" have understood the value of "Targeted Divide and Conquer" for a while now. A line from Metallica's Master of Puppets comes to mind: Keep them tired it makes them well.
This is also very evident in the reactions to the election. Trump and the GOP were all screaming and hollering about election fraud right up until it looked like they wound win. Then crickets. Everyone is in only when their own team is winning.
Union leaders don't want to risk their position and union by breaking the law. American law highly restricts when a strike can happen. The punishment for companies is generally a fine or a do over for things like a ballot. Punishment for a Union is often the dissolution of the Union.
Basically we need to completely rebuild the ideology around unions. Right now if a union were to strike illegally, get dissolved, stay on strike, and then prevent scabs from entering; they would be beaten, arrested, and ridiculed by fellow workers. We won't ever see a large strike in the US until workers remember that they are the de facto source of wealth and start acting like it.
We don't refuse I think it's just too hard to coordinate.
I'll take any day off work. I'm looking for excuses!
It’s not like people need to even get into the streets. Everyone just coordinate to call in sick one day. Just one day to show yourselves the power you have, then go from there.
American billionaires want self driving cars specifically because they can't strike.
What the fuck are you talking about? Let me guess, you work at Taco Bell?
Dude. Any one of the European countries doing this is as small as one of our states. Even the largest ones aren't the same size and scale as our largest ones. Then each state is diverse to a suprising level and has individual groups, laws and viewpoints that affect them all differently. And that's all ignoring the politics of everything. And ignoring that Americans have zero safety nets for when they are out of work for something like a strike. Most don't have enough food or money saved to survive a strike. You are very obviously ignorant of life here, whether you live here or not. A nationwide general strike is impossible here. When I see a coordinated strike across all of europe, you might have a point. And if a general strike is decided here I will be among the first to sign up. But until then you are too ignorant of the states and their people to make any assertion as to what is possible here.
Cost of housing seem to be the primary issue plaguing the world. Even in china the real estate market is fucked.. but they have too much in locations people are not.
It's almost as if a lot of societal rules (that are mostly needed) create an unfree Market causing shortages.. and governments refusing to acknowledge that they should be organising it and not leaving it to "the market" are the cause of the issue.
Organizing means organizing, not building all houses themselves.
Europe is facing population decline. Houses should get cheaper, not more expensive, and the fact that prices keep rising means that they are artificially inflated.
the second anyone was allowed to use houses as an "investment" to gain wealth we basically guaranteed this. obviously anyone with a lot of money tied up in housees is going to try and make their value go up. once we got multinational billion dollar conglomerates involved it became child's play for them to make that number go up through infinite methods of varrying complexity carried out by thousands of people working together with billions of dollars behind them.
this problem is inherent to a housing market that people are allowed to speculate on. we just need to make that stop entirely. limit house ownership. no one needs 100 houses. especially not companies. if that results in less rental houses than desired, we need to build more apartments. apartments are different beast, but if the cost of houses are lower then it will be harder to inflate rent if they can afford a house instead. this may result in some people who want to rent a house, but not an apartment, unable to find that. that's not a big problem. they might just need to rent an apartment instead. certainly it's much less of a problem then the current state of no one being able to afford housing.
the rich don't need this vector for growing their wealth. they have enough others and are doing quite alright at it. the world will function just fine without mult billion dollar corporations investing in buying properties for the sole reason that they think they can extract wealth without contributing anything. houses should be for living in, not for extracting wealth.
Alas, it's not trivial to move houses from deserted villages into booming cities. Plenty of European cities already have anti-speculation and rent controls in place, it's not really helping.
Quickest and cheapest option would be to expand public transport actually, I think, spread out the pressure, combined with more remote work. Once you've got a steady, if overall tiny, de-urbanisation trickle going on urban prices are going to tank.
Government really should be building housing themselves though and working on the zoning laws to make building easier. Even in a free market the government should be a competitor driving prices down to fair levels.
Measures like rent control don't work because landlords are greedy. People end up staying in locations that don't fit them anymore for the rent control, landlords try to chase those tenants away and don't improve the property, new housing stops being developed and supply/demand get wrecked.
Measures like stimulus and tax rebates for first time buyers tends to increase the cost of real estate as well. It's called a demand subsidy and generally isn't a great way to tackle a supply problem. The individual home buyers will be helped at the expense of tax payer money and real estate cost - and the types of homes being bought aren't necessarily the best use of land either depending.
Restricting companies from bulk purchasing and holding real estate seems like a good idea but again when you remove that new housing, especially multi-tenant housing, stops being built. Supply goes down prices shoot up...unless of course the government is willing to personally finance and build out the supply and keep prices fair.
I kinda agree. But I see the government has a role in the zoning and deciding where and what. Like building bridges and roads, define, assign, possible finance and have commercial parties execute in a well regulated environment
It’s governments that are responsible for a lack of housing: local governments through zoning policy. The homeowners in a given city are politically engaged and they vote to protect their own investment in real estate. Call it NIMBYism if you like but homeowners are never going to voluntarily agree to have their house go down in price. Doing so could put their mortgage underwater and result in losing their home and becoming homeless.
Japan does not have this issue to nearly the same extent because they have structured their governments differently. Zoning laws are set by the national government, not the local one, so problems like this can (and have been) set at the national level.
For other countries to solve their housing problem Japan style would require the national government to take power away from the local governments (and in the case of the US, this would put the federal government in a fight with state governments). It would be an extremely messy fight and probably not work out.
I'm far from a "the free market solves all!" Type of person, but this is more likely due to government intervention, with zoning laws that restrict the density that can be built in certain areas, rather than a problem with the the free market run amok.
Like it's insane that nearly 40% of the land in San Fran is zoned for single family. This is government doing, not the free market.
We need more housing to alleviate the problem. But what we also need is a mindset shift of the everyday person that they aren't getting a 3k sqft house on an acre of land.
There's one common denominator across international lines. It's rent seeking capital looking for a free buck. The zoning laws are literally just regulatory capture of that rent seeking mentality. They're a symptom of the fundamental problem. The one thing too many refuse to see is that this is not a strictly corporate phenomenon. There's all kinds looking for "passive income." Rent seeking is the new American dream, as Trump shows. And it's not exclusive to us.
Love to see it!
Why did they stop?
One reason could be that salaries are so low for the newer generations that even a few days of strike and you will not make the month.
Literally I do not know anyone that pays rent, does not live with their parents and has savings.
Somehow 50% ended up in the capital, which has skyrocketed renting prices. The minimum salary is literally arround 700 euros. You cannot find an actual house that is not a fucking shack under 500, that is not a joke, I am trying to survive in this shithole by myself and I do not see the point.
low salaries lead to people that cannot strike. To be fair, most, do not even consider it as an option due to "nothing will change"... fucking logic