Sitting in his office on a recent morning beneath photographs of Marx, Lenin and Che Guevara, Nikos Fotopoulos, the leader of Greece’s most powerful labor union, took a freshly printed flier from a stack. “We are ready for new battles,” it read.
“And we are,” Mr. Fotopoulos said, sipping an energy drink and then chasing it with an espresso. “We will continue with street protests because we still have unfinished business with the government and the troika,” he said, referring to Greece’s three foreign lenders: the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission.
Last month, amid violent protests, Prime Minister George A. Papandreou narrowly managed to push a new package of austerity measures through Parliament, including plans for selling $71 billion in state assets, a step that economists and the troika say is crucial to overhauling Greece’s bloated public sector.
But whether Mr. Papandreou will be able to carry out the plan will depend to a large extent on people like Mr. Fotopoulos. His union, Genop, represents workers at the Public Power Corporation, which is owned jointly by the government and by private investors.
For those who ask how this is relevant to them; welcome to the future if OUR government can’t get a handle on local, state, and federal spending as well as the debt that goes with it. – Ed.
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