AKEL International Workers Day Declaration
AKEL C.C. Press Office, 1st May 2016, Nicosia
We honor Workers Day this year as well, the international day of the working people and their long struggles for a better world. We pay tribute to the pioneering workers of Chicago and with them, also to the vanguard fighters of class struggles being waged all over the world.
On the occasion of Workers May Day, AKEL addresses a warm and militant greeting to the Cypriot working class and all working people, Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots, Maronites, Armenians, Latins and all workers who live and work in Cyprus. We also honor today the vanguard militants of the workers movement in Cyprus, who through their struggles changed our country’s life for the better. All these gains that were won through fierce struggles are today in danger of being reversed. We send a message of determination and struggle for the defence of these gains.
For yet another year, working people commemorate Worker’s Day under the burden of the ongoing global capitalist crisis, which in fact is turning out to be the biggest in its history. Entire infrastructures for welfare that were established to meet elementary human needs, are today either being abolished because they are considered no longer profitable or being sold off at any price to big private capital because they are profitable. The gains of the second half of the 20th century won through fierce and often bloody struggles of workers are today being reversed by the forces of neoliberal capitalism. At the same time, economic inequalities are growing, while the 85 richest people in the world possess all that the poorest 3.5 billion own (namely 50% of the world population).
In Cyprus, working people are celebrating Worker’s Day, while for three years now austerity policies, the redistribution of wealth and poverty are being enforced on the pretext of supposedly “rescuing the economy”. In the end in Cyprus too as elsewhere, the victims of these policies are the majority of society who are being impoverished, while the privileged few are getting richer. In these conditions, AKEL was, and remains, the main bastion of resistance for the people and workers. It is at the forefront and struggling for a just distribution of burdens and to protect society, workers and SME’s, but also our national wealth.
This year’s Worker’s Day is being celebrated on the eve of parliamentary elections. At stake in the upcoming elections is whether the path of increasing inequality and impoverishment will continue or whether an end will finally be put to this path. With a strong AKEL, the working people of Cyprus can make the difference.
