Cyprus marks Labour Day today with the usual union-organised parades to mark the past struggles of the workers. And although working conditions, pay and living standards have improved dramatically in the last 30 to 40 years, hearing the declarations of unions, you would think we were living in the 1950s when workers struggled to make ends meet.
For the unions, which have to justify their existence, so as to carry on taking the monthly subscription from their members and, more importantly, their pension fund contributions, the class struggle is still raging and they have to defend the impoverished downtrodden workers. This is the impression given by reading the May 1 declaration of the Sek union federation, which sounds more left-wing than the Akel union federation Peo.
Sek informed us in its May 1 declaration that it was “seeking a development model that was people-centred, rejecting approaches that downgrade the dignity and quality in employment.” What sort of development model did we have until now? Exploitative capitalism that leaves workers penniless and living in slums? This is the impression we are given by Sek’s self-appointed defenders of the workers, who sound as Marxist as their comrades of Akel.
“The competitiveness of the Cyprus economy is not threatened by wages, but by the erosion of purchasing power, profiteering and delays in the smooth and socially just transition to the digital and green transformation.” This is straight out of the Akel book of anti-capitalist rhetoric that labels all businesses as “profiteering,” and refuses to accept the fact that business profits are vital for economic growth and improvement of living standards.
It is the profit motive that ensured the continuous improvement of living standards in the market economies of the West. In the communist economies of the former Eastern Bloc where companies made no profits, the workers never saw their material conditions improve. It was a people-centred model of development that the wise union bosses of Sek want to impose in Cyprus to ensure there is no profiteering.
The communists of Akel have managed to make everyone think like them on the economy. Businesses, making profits, are enemies of the people and only union bosses know what is good for the economy. Nobody dares to challenge this propaganda and praise the market economy thanks to which the people of Cyprus have seen their standard of living on a steady upward path. It is this system that has made all people relatively better off and not the narrow-minded union bosses, who specialize in anti-market economy platitudes.
By all means celebrate Labour Day and pay tribute to the workers that fought for better pay and working conditions in days gone by. But we should also accept that we live in different times, times in which workers have much better lives, thanks to the market economy.