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Venizelos, Kouvelis Tell Samaras: No Worker Firings

With international lenders turning the screws on Greece – including extending working hours to 78 hours a week and raising the retirement age to 67 – Prime Minister Antonis Samaras was unable to convince his reluctant coalition partners, PASOK Socialist leader Evangelos Venizelos and Democratic Left chief Fotis Kouvelis to accept the lay off and eventual firing of up to 35,000 public workers over the next three years.
The New Democracy Conservative chief failed to persuade Venizelos and Kouvelis in a meeting to bend to demands from the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) to accept the harsh measures in return for a pending $38.8 billion loan installment – the last in a first series of $152 billion in rescue loans – and a second bailout of $173 billion. Without the monies, Greece will be unable to pay its workers and pensioners and go broke, but Kouvelis especially drew a red line against firing workers.
“The Troika has to realize that no measure can be applied in a society that is dissolving,” Kouvelis told reporters after the meeting, referring to the breakdown of Greek life as more than two-and-a-half years of austerity measures have worsened a five-year recession, putting nearly two million people out of work, closed 68,000 businesses and is shrinking the economy by 7 percent.
Kouvelis and Venizelos gave Samaras their party’s votes after he won the June 17 elections but without enough support to form a government, and the two Leftist leaders have supported pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions but say the Troika has now gone too far.
Venizelos stated that the talks with the Troika are difficult and continuous and made it clear that Greece needs another two years to impose reforms and meet fiscal targets to reduce the deficit from 9.3 to 3 percent – which Samaras wanted but did not ask for from the Troika – and that he too would not sit still for worker firings nor measures aimed primarily at workers, pensioners and the poor.
When he was finance minister in a previous government, however, Venizelos doubled income and property taxes and taxed the poor but has reversed his positions as polls show his party plummeting to only 8 percent support, behind the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, while the Democratic Left has fallen to only 4 percent.
Samaras is under the gun to make $14.6 billion in cuts to keep rescue monies coming and has to deliver a blueprint to Troika envoys now in Athens on Sept. 14, but is finding it difficult to get consensus from his partners. Finance Minister Yiannis Stournaras is more optimistic, saying he believes there will be convergence before Greece has to meet with the lenders who are getting tougher with their demands.
A wave of strikes has already hit Greece, with doctors, teachers, judges, uniformed officers, and other workers walking off the job for various periods this week and the country’s two largest labor unions, representing both public and private workers, is gearing up for a massive general strike sometime this month as social anger grows against more pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions. Samaras acknowledged the measures were “unfair and unjust” but said he has no choice as Greece would be left bereft and broke without the Troika loans and collapse into chaos.

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