General Confederation of Greek Workers

A new fund providing auxiliary social security to about 2 million workers in different professions in the private sector has been the focus of talks among social partners, employer associations and the General Confederation of Greek Labor (GSEE), which have now entered an advanced stage.

Private sector union GSEE has called a four-hour work stoppage on Monday in order to facilitate participation in a protest rally in downtown Athens marking International Day of Disabled Persons.

Public transport was disrupted and ships remained in ports as Greek workers went on strike on Wednesday, seeking increases in minimum wages and the re-introduction of collective bargaining.

Athens will be left without metro, electric railway and tram services on November 28 as their employees' unions will join a 24-hour anti-austerity strike called by the country's private sector union, GSEE.

City bus workers will also join the action in the early morning and late at night, meaning that services will run from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on that day.

Greek industrialists have set two conditions for it to agree to an increase in the minimum wage: a parallel increase in average productivity and the immediate reduction of social security contributions.

Raising the minimum salary, activating sector labor contracts, avoiding pension cuts and preserving the tax-free ceiling at the current level are the means to keeping the economy's growth rate in positive territory, according to the General Confederation of Greek Labor (GSEE).

A survey commissioned by the GSEE umbrella union and published on Tuesday shows that 70 percent of workers in Greece aged 25 to 44 years old are pessimistic about the country's prospects and 66 percent have few hopes of seeing any improvement in their salaries in the next six months.

Nine in 10 employees in Greece's private sector faced worsening labor conditions in the years of the debt crisis, according to a survey carried out for the General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE) on the occasion of the centenary of its founding.

Protesters participating in a rally against the name deal signed between Athens and Skopje last June on the name of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) clashed with police forces outside Thessaloniki's city hall on Saturday evening, ahead of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras' keynote speech in the city.

Nine in 10 Greeks believe that austerity policies will continue in Greece despite the exit from the eight-year bailout period on August 20, according to the results of a survey released on Thursday.