Murder of Anti-Fascist Hip-Hop Artist in Greece Adds Fuel to Ongoing Labor Strikes

Facing yet another set of mass employee layoffs and cuts to public sector benefits, tens of thousands of public workers took to the streets in Greece’s two largest cities on Wednesday, part of a broader series of labor union strikes and protests that began earlier this week.

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Joining secondary school teachers who began a five-day strike of their own on Monday, workers from the healthcare, judicial, municipal, journalism, and public transportation sectors walked of the job to initiate a planned 48-hour strike just days before high-level officials from the European Troika—which includes the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund—arrive in Athens to assess the status of the austerity reforms they imposed on the Greek economy in exchange for financial “assistance.”

Political tensions were especially high on Wednesday, following news that leftwing artist and activist—Pavlos Fyssas, well known for his hip-hop music and anti-fascist leanings—was murdered on Tuesday. The alleged assailant, according to reports, is a member of Greece’s neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn. As the Guardian’s Helena Smith reports:

The latest reforms fueling this week’s strikes include a partial-pay-suspension of 25,000 civil servants and thousands of layoffs and job-reassignments—all steps that have been designed to drastically shrink the country’s public sector workforce in exchange for the latest installment of Troika “rescue loans.”

Over 9,000 workers filled Athens’ Syntagma Square, while roughly 10,000 others were reported demonstrating in the nation’s second largest city Thessaloniki.

“We want to tell the government enough is enough,” a 54-year-old teacher, Vasiliki Angelatou, told Reuters. “They are firing indiscriminately. We’ve reached our limits.”

“A long, onerous and painful winter has begun,” public sector union ADEDY said in a statement. “The truth is that with every troika visit, our national dignity is destroyed. The economy and society are ruined.”

“Austerities of increasing severities have been being applied in some European countries and we are not seeing any serious or sustained recoveries in these economies,” James Meadway, a senior economist at the New Economics Foundation in London, told Al Jazeera Wednesday.

“Precisely because austerity is the thing that drives recession,” he said. “You are setting up this vicious circle of decline in which Greece is very much trapped into.”

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