It's hot, pushing 40C, so the men are mostly hugging the deep pools of shade that are now all that's offered them by the factory where they used to work. They're sitting on cheap plastic garden chairs, drinking iced water and coffee and playing backgammon.

Others wait in front of the gates, banners stretched behind them. "Solidarity with the steelworkers of Greece," reads one, in unexpected German. "Their struggle is ours." Taped to the wall are letters from well-wishers, among them France's Secours Populaire and the RMT transport union.

"We've been overwhelmed by the support, from inside Greece and abroad," says George Sifonios, 54, the works union organiser and leader of a strike that has come to symbolise the resistance of Greece's workers to the agonies being inflicted on their country. "Without it, we'd be broken. But people really see that if we lose in this factory, all Greece's workers will lose."

The workers of Elliniki Halyvourgia – the name means Greek Steelworks – in Aspropyrgos, 40 minutes' drive from central Athens, have been on strike for 228 days. In October, the factory's owners informed them that in the current economic climate they had, regrettably, no option but to move to a five-hour working day.

The factory's 380 workers would be expected to take a 40% pay cut. And if the union rejected the deal, 180 jobs at Halyvourgia – whose iron rods and girders helped build the Athens metro, the Olympic stadium, and the bridge linking the Peloponnese to mainland Greece – would go. "Nobody could believe it," says Sifonios. From 2009 to 2011, production here rose by 40%, he explains. "We were working at full stretch. I had 19 days' holiday I couldn't take last year, we were so busy. The owners said demand had collapsed due to the crisis. We just couldn't see it."

In a show of hands, all 280 workers who came to the union meeting voted in favour of strike action. Since then, backed by PAME, the communist trade union federation, they have received more than 4,500 letters of support from labour organisations and other groups around the world, including schools. Donations have flowed in. On May Day, 40,000 people turned up for a rally.

But the owner, Nikos Manesis, hasn't been idle either. Under new labour laws introduced as part of the terms of the Greece's EU/International Monetary Fund bailout, he has fired 119 workers. Production has been shifted to a sister factory in Volos, whose workers did accept the five-hour deal – and which is now working at maximum capacity. A protracted battle over the strike's legality is being waged.

How much longer can they hold out? Yannis Mourdekas, 35, had worked at Halyvourgia for nine years before he was sacked in November. He earned €950 (£770) a month; his unemployment benefit was recently cut from €460 to €360. His brother is also jobless, and both now live with their mother, whose pension, thankfully, continues to arrive.

"We have family meetings every tme we have to spend anything," he says, "to see if we can justify it." He spends his days here because "it's important to show even those who've been fired still support the strike," and he has no plans to start looking for any other work just yet. "We have to fight. We're the future," he says.

Georgia Nafplioti's husband is an electrician with 31 years' service at the works. But Georgia was made redundant two years ago (meaning she is no longer entitled to benefit) and the couple are also supporting their unemployed daughter and son-in-law. They have enough savings, she reckons, to survive for another three months.

They're paying bills, but not the raft of new taxes the government is demanding: "If they need the money, they should take it from those who stole it. We always paid our tax."

She says the company keeps trying to buy her husband off by offering him the points he needs to complete his pension if he'll sue the union. Or threatening to fire him without a payoff. "But I've told him," she says. "I'd rather he came home with his redundancy papers and no money than sell out. I'm a communist. I won't back down."

• Jon Henley is in Greece telling real people's stories. Please contact him if you have suggestions for people he could see or places he could visit, or send him your personal story (not too long, please). He will post as much as he can on the blog. Jon can be contacted on Twitter (@jonhenley) where the hashtag for this series is #EuroDebtTales, or by email (jon.henley@theguardian.com).