50,000
march against unemployment
The workers of the two factories tried to demonstrate in Athens in front of the parliament and the university. But they were isolated by the student association, which is controlled by the two Communist parties and the PASOK (the centrist organization headed by Papandreou) and were attacked by the police. Only the Trotskyists supported the workers in a continuous manner. On November 11 the Internationalist Communist party, OW. GERMANY The recession has confronted the West German working class with a new problem, unemployment. The youth have been especially hard hit: There are now some 200,000-250, 000 unemployed youth in the country. A good number of them are unskilled and have scarcely any chance of learning a trade. The increase of unemployment among the youth, the elimination of many apprenticeships, and the shortage of professional training stimulated action by trade-union youth as early as 1974. Tens of thousands of young people have participated in local and regional actions. Pressure built up for these actions to be combined into a national demonstration. At first, the union bureaucracy tried to transform this project into a meeting in an indoor hall. But the massive protest by trade-union youth, who began to influence other sectors of the unión movement, ended up forcing the bureaucracy to call a central street demonstration in the city of Dortmund. The bureaucracy then tried a second maneuver: to strictly limit the number of demonstrators (to 20,000) and to make the problem of "co-management" the theme of the demonstration. The intent was to avoid any trouble with the Social Democratic chancellor and ministers. But the Dortmund demonstration had become such a pole of attraction for the most combative workers - who ever since the beginning of the recession have been straining at the bit because of the trade-union bureaucracy's successive capitulations to pressure from the employers and the government aimed at reducing real wages and increasing profits - that this maneuver also triggered a storm of protest. In many cities local trade-union leaders mobilized participants in numbers that vastly exceeded the quotas 30
Greek section of the Fourth International, organized a meeting to commemorate the fifty-eighth anniversary of the October Revolution (an event not commemorated by either of the Communist parties). A delegation of MEL strikers participated in the meeting, and the president of the strike committee spoke. In his speech, he praised the role played by the "socialist trade-union tendency" (a group inspired by our Greek comrades) in the struggles of the strikers in Athens and Salonika. set by the central bureaucracy of the DGB (Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund, the national trade-union federation). In areas where the local union leaders bowed to the orders of the central bureaucracy, groups of trade unionists took independent initiatives to get to Dortmund. In the end, some 50,000 workers participated in the demonstration, which was held November 8. They fransformed it into a huge action against unemployment, against the strategy of the employers, and against the policies of the Social Democratic and liberal ministers. The demonstration concluded with an indoor meeting; half of the demonstrators were unable to get in. Nevertheless, the speech given by DGB President Vetter, which was centered on co-management, did not receive an enthusiastic response. The workers know from experience that the plague of layoffs and short workweeks is being felt even in factories in industrial branches in which parity co-management exists (coal and steel). The Dortmund demonstration was one of the most important trade-union actions in West Germany since the 1950s. It reflected the fact that in spite of the ebb in workers struggles during the past two years, the overall relationship of class forces has not deteriorated for the West German working class. It also represented the first massive response of West German workers to the recession. And at the same time, it showed that at the present stage the most combative elements of the workers vanguard in West Germany prefer to struggle with the support of the trade-union organization, even though they oppose the ultraconciliatory and even capitulationist orientation of the union bureaucracy.