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Members of the communist-affiliated PAME union taking part in a demonstration marking a 24-hour general strike against austerity in Athens today. Photograph: Dimitris Michalakis/Reuters

A general strike has paralysed Greece as anger grows over government attempts to crack down on the ability of unionists to press ahead with industrial action.

Helena Smith reports from Athens.

Anti-austerity protests nationwide will cap a general strike that has brought much of the country to a standstill. The 24-hour lockdown follows creditor-dictated reforms aimed at reversing what is widely seen as the hallowed right to call strike action.

Unions representing workers in both the public and private sector are up in arms vowing to fight “to the end” to protect rights won, they say, with blood and sweat.



“It is a right first won a hundred years ago and we are going to do everything we can to defend it,” Grigoris Kalomoiris, chief policy maker at the union of public sector employees, ADEDY, told the Guardian.

“The government will have to withdraw its promise to lenders,” he said of the international bodies behind three successive bailouts of debt-stricken Greece.

The measure is among an array of reforms Athens’ leftist-led coalition has agreed to implement to expedite a third review that, if concluded, could see Greece exiting international supervision and returning to capital markets.

Addressing protestors this morning, community party chief Dimitris Koutsoumbas said:

“the government is continuing the misery, it is continuing the dirty work against the Greek people.”

The 24-hour walk-out has not only closed all state services but disrupted public transport and flights in and out of the country.

A woman walks in a train station during a 24-hour general strike in Thessaloniki today. Photograph: Sakis Mitrolidis/AFP/Getty Images

Earlier this week, unionists angrily targeted Greece’s pre-eminent capitalist symbol: the headquarters of the Hellenic Federation of Industrialists claiming the ground was being prepared for a new round of assaults against wages, contracts and collective labour agreements “in order to increase the profits and privileges of industrial circles.”

In a carefully planned raid, workers affiliated with the communist labour force, Pame, threw red paint at the neo-classical building housing the federation in the heart of Athens before daubing its façade with the slogan: “get your hands off the right to strike” and “751 euro the minimum wage.”