Bourgeois democracy makes proclamations regarding human rights in a very pretentious manner. Notwithstanding these formal proclamations, capitalism in practice denies any individual or collective right, whenever its implementation conflicts with the class interests of the bourgeoisie or the maximization of profit.

In this sense, workers’ rights, including the right to strike, are not an exception. Many bourgeois constitutions formally recognize the right to strike, but in practice the governments and the instruments of repression apply measures in order to defeat the right to strike and more generally to frustrate social protests in many countries, even to the extent of shedding the blood of workers.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the consolidation of reformism inside trade unions, capital relaunched a harsh attack against workers’ rights in general and the right to strike in particular.

Today the attack against the right to strike and workers’ rights generally is growing deeper and sharper, planned and coordinated by the organs of the EU and by the bourgeois governments. In many countries, member states of the EU (Belgium, Britain, Greece, Italy, etc), the governments approve bills that restrict the right to strike, extending to a total ban on strikes in some cases.

It is evident that this strategy by the EU, by capital, and by governments to restrict the right to strike is a part of a more general attack by capital against the working class in order to guarantee to the bourgeoisie full governance and control of the capitalist restructuring process, planned and coordinated at the European Union level with the active complicity of collaborationist official trade unions, new and old social-democracy and opportunists in the workers’ movement.

Those that believe that anti-labour laws will abolish the workers’ struggles and will stop strikes and collective actions are fooling themselves.

In consideration of all the above, the parties of the European Communist Initiative call upon the working class and the people’s strata to struggle proclaiming:

  • Hands off the right to strike and trade-union activity.
  • Abolish every strike-breaking practice, expose and isolate the compromised reformist leaderships in the trade-union movement.
  • Strengthen the struggle against the EU, capital and the bourgeois governments in favor of Collective Job Contracts and workers’ rights.

Legal restrictions and repression will not defeat the working class and their resistance, until the final victory, until the working class becomes the master of the wealth it produces!