Intervention of Neoklis Sylikiotis, AKEL MEP and GUE/NGL Vice-President in the debate “European response to the unemployment crisis”

 

29th September 2015, Ireland

 

“The crisis is a structural crisis of the system and unemployment is unfortunately a way of putting pressure on workers and trade unions in order to impose the deregulation of the labour market, the abolition of collective agreements, cuts in working people’s rights, the compression of wages and social benefits downwards and the increase in the profitability of big monopoly enterprises”, declared Neoklis Sylikiotis today, AKEL MEP and Vice-President of GUE/NGL, in his intervention at the Group’s Study Days taking place in Ireland. Neoklis Sylikiotis participated in the Group’s discussion on the subject “The European Response to the unemployment crisis.”

“In Cyprus, in just one year (from 1st January 2014 until 1st January 2015) the island’s population decreased by 11,000 people. Unemployment in July 2015 reached 16.3%, and youth unemployment exceeds 30% (31.9%)”, the AKEL MEP pointed out, stressing the fact that these figures reflect the current reality not just in Cyprus.

The AKEL MEP went on to add that, “This is the reality that the peoples of Europe are living since 2008 when the first neoliberal responses to the structural crisis of capitalism were translated into the imposition of Memoranda and neoliberal austerity policies. Unemployment is inextricably linked to these policies, which deregulates the market, destroys labour relations, dissolves the productive forces, and pushes more and more families into poverty and exclusion”.

Neoklis Sylikiotis concluded his intervention by stating, “Consequently, the European response to unemployment cannot be anything else other than the strengthening of the Left in each EU member state, aiming at the liberation from the Memoranda vicious austerity policies. Organized struggle through the mass trade union and other movements, with the parties of the Left all over Europe playing the leading role and at the forefront of struggles is the way to give a voice to the working people, the long-term unemployed, young people and impoverished pensioners. The Left is the force that must fight to restore the right of each Member State to decide its own fiscal policy, and promote corresponding public investments, which should aim at the reindustrialization of the Member States, ensuring labour and social security, and mainly creating new jobs and social justice”.