Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informational reading.

The right to strike in modern Greece is exercised without obstacles and, in the view of most people, abusively, because by exercising it strikers usually paralyze every possibility of free movement for citizens as a whole and show complete indifference to the damage they cause to others.

There is information that in Sweden striking is not permitted for certain reasons, which it is worth learning, so that we may take an example and draw lessons from that foreign society and its institutions, a society that appears to prosper and, compared with Greece, consists of citizens who are optimistic and happy.

The majority of citizens and, above all, the residents of Athens, have suffered and continue to suffer daily indescribable hardship because of strikes by various categories of professionals, who seek and insist, by exercising their “right” to strike, on wearing down all their other fellow citizens, to whom they deny the right to move wherever they wish, depriving them of a significant part of their freedom, and, as a rule, harming the economic life of the cities and of the country as a whole.

Strikes are announced by organized guilds of interests and have expanded even to the point that lawyers, judges and prosecutors also “strike” or, in another formulation, “abstain” from their duties, seeking to preserve the privileges secured against other citizens, privileges that have been falsely baptized as “rights”. Only beggars have not gone on strike so far...

As the right to strike is exercised in modern Greece, it shows that those who strike and those who abstain from their duties are not interested in the good and prosperity of society, but look after, short-sightedly, only the preservation of the privileges they have managed to secure through various forms of pressure upon other citizens.

Greek society should probably imitate the Swedish model and regulate the issue of the strike accordingly, since the strike must give way to the right to work, which must be accompanied by ethics (work ethics), if Greek society is to manage to recover at every level, beginning with the economic one.

For the citizen to have a right to strike, he must set aside and abolish the various social “guarantees”, decide that he must work in reality and not symbolically, and undertake work according to his abilities and qualifications and not according to his demands and pursuits. First of all, all idle paid posts, the various fictitious pensions and all privileges of professional classes must be abolished immediately and, after that, once it has been decided that progress is earned only through serious work, thought may be given to strikes and to their possible necessity in certain cases.