This Monday will not be like any other Monday…

This Monday, I will not wake up at 5am, I will not make my lunchbox, I will not travel 100km to get to work. Because I have no job anymore. My employer decided that there is no place for me at his company, he paid my severance pay and send me to queue for the dole. You would expect from a union leader like me to say ‘nothing is lost, heads up colleagues, we will meet again in the streets’ and ‘all together we can make it’. These words are nice, but this time I talk about feelings, fears and conclusions. I will write the rest in a flyer in case someone reads it and decides to take the streets.

This Monday will not be like any other Monday… This Monday, I am no longer an employed worker but an unemployed worker.

But why does anybody become a worker?

The answer is easy. It’s because he did not manage to become anything else. It is the natural ending for someone that does not do well at school or for someone that just followed the job of his father or both.

Except if you have always been stupid just as I have been and you think that the only one that can claim with pride for being a ‘worker’ is the man who lives in dirt.

If you have your father as your example who was always speaking against the ‘Public sector’, it doesn’t take much to believe it. The truth is that my father stopped to speak against the ‘public sector’ only when my sister became a civil servant.

So, I was consciously and proudly naming myself ‘worker’ since I was 18. My father was my boss and I was buying books of Marx at the festivals of the Communist Youth (KNE). I was deliberately having dirty hands to show that a conscious worker can study and understand the writings of Marx better than any fake intellectual…

Of course, the books remained unread in my bookcase as I lacked the patience and the ability to understand them. Perhaps, now that I have plenty of time, I will manage better.

I continued being a worker until last week that I reached 41 years. From now on, nobody knows. What I gained in my last job – besides the work-pressure and the 2 pills per day that I was taking compulsory to prevent me going over my limits and fail to see my favorite team Aris becoming the champion – was the verification of things for some types of workers. I was always suspecting these things but I was ashamed to express them because for me the labor class is both proud and immortal.

I verified my beliefs for the most representative type of worker.

The most representative type of worker is the worker that is able to dance always with the cigarette in his mouth. This is the most singed deception in the Greek history by famous popular singers. My god, what a deception! It’s a deception to know that the person next to you is the bosses’ snitch, shirks constantly and provocatively, fights with his brothers for his parents’ inheritance, sits at your table only if you buy him a drink, he is helping himself too much with my cigarettes but identifies himself to the worker with the clean hands and the big heart as he dances -  or better jumps like a goat…

However, the worst of all is the worker who becomes a foreman. This is a case that requires psychoanalysis.  Firstly, he accepts this job as a result of his ability at work and as a physical promotion that justifies years of effort. Typically, although he is unable even to write down his name properly, he maintains the lists of the workers with great responsibility. He accepts the task of forcing pressure, blackmailing and threatening the workers that question the working conditions and engage themselves in trade-union activities. Of course, the workers hate foremen and consider themselves more able than them. Nevertheless, workers do not forget to laugh with any cold joke foremen make, to buy them coffee or bring them eggs or chicken as presents from their village. As they didn’t manage to become the pet of the boss, they try at least to garter around the pet of the boss. The most successful pet of the boss is the man that has the most gartering around him. At the end of the day, I think that bosses could exist without workers but not without foremen.

In my job, I got also to know the basic skills of Human Resource senior employee. Actually, there is only one basic skill for this job: to be an ‘ex-leftist’. This is the skill that gives you access to all posts. Such a person knows best the way of thinking of workers, he is able to force pressure on them and blackmail them in the best way. At the end, he is always successful. Those being leftists should consider that the added value is to be an ex-leftist and not a leftist. A serious company always makes sure to hire such a useful employee. Another basic property of a company is that it makes sure to resemble as much as possible with the army.

First of all, you pass through exams just like in the army. Then they vaccinate you just like the army does. Then you are given a uniform, boots and helmets just like the army. You swear obedience by signing a confidentiality contract that forbids you to leak any secrets of the company. You are entitled to leave just like in the army and you survive by having high-level ‘acquaintances’ and by snitching others just like in the army.

Finally, this Monday will not be like any other Monday. My friend George will go to work alone, while I will be running from my pension fund (IKA) to the employment office.

But please, from now on, if any laid off colleague meets me in the streets, let’s not ask me again what we shall do from now on. I am so deep in shit and so lost as he is, so I cannot tell him how we can fight this. The only thing I can tell are the lyrics of Aggelakas from the song ‘Everything is Street’ (‘Ola einai dromos’): ‘you are not alone, I am not alone, everything is street’.

It’s high time, colleagues to start listening to the songs of the group Trypes (enough with the ‘dirty hands’…) and take the streets. Take someone from the hand and join the march that passes next to you. You cannot imagine how beautiful are the streets when you walk them together and shout slogans against those that destroyed our Mondays.

this Monday will not be like any other Monday..

But from now on, no Monday will be like any other Monday.

Until Saturday evening comes that smells basilicum and asbest (cc. lyric from a famous Greek song)

*Welder

Head of the Trade Union “GALARIA”

Currently unemployed

 

http://galaria2010.blogspot.com/