The ongoing mobilisation for the General Strike, with the support of a wide range of sectors, is already a powerful demonstration of rejection of the Labour Package that the Government and the rest of the right-wing, serving the interests of employers, intend to impose, in a serious setback for rights and an unacceptable worsening of the exploitation of workers.

The more the Minister of Labour attacks the workers, the clearer the intentions of the Government and employers become, the more unity grows, and the conviction increases that this struggle is just.

A struggle that will not yield to a Labour Code that is already very unbalanced against the workers:

• When it is easy and cheap to dismiss employees, with extremely low compensation payments.

• When the worker is prevented from challenging collective dismissals in court if they receive meagre compensation.

• When the expiry of collective agreements is a weapon used by employers to undermine collective bargaining and impose a rollback of rights.

• When the principle of more favourable treatment for workers has yet to be restored.

• When cuts to pay and compensation for overtime have yet to be corrected.

But they want the Code to go even further in exploiting precariousness, blatantly deregulating working hours, and making improper and abusive use of shift work and night work.

This labour package shows no sign of modernisation, or even inspiration from scientific and technological advances – it is a return to the exploitative model typical of the 19^th. century.

Scientific innovation shows that it is possible to reduce the working week to 35 hours and the working day to seven hours in all sectors.

But employers, the Government and the rest of the right-wing want to increase it to 50 or more hours per week; they even want to return to working from dawn to dusk.

The Government is so committed to attacking workers' rights that it is even willing to sacrifice the hallowed social dialogue agreement.

The Government is attacking all workers, seeking to crush the rights and aspirations of young people – young workers and all young people!

The Government says that young people do not want jobs for life, as if three quarters of new employment contracts today were not already temporary.

But young people want to be able to decide their own lives and not be forced into permanent precariousness, they want a secure and predictable life, fair careers and wages, to start a family and have time for themselves and their loved ones.

And yet, the Government wants to make their precariousness worse, perpetuate their fixed-term contracts, and leave them with no prospects in life.

A life chained to the interests of the boss; imprisoned by the intensification of the pace and duration of work; crushed by the deregulation of working hours, by individual hour banks and the widespread imposition of group hour banks.

A life captured for the appropriation of personal and family time and disrespect for maternity and paternity rights.

A life of increasingly long working hours, so long that retirement age is not in sight, and eternalised in a model of low wages and poorly paid overtime, subject to the whims of profit.

The supposed modernity of this labour package reeks of stale and outdated ideas and fails to conceal the brutal attacks on constitutional rights.

With their class hatred, the Government and the rest of the right-wing serving capital seek to destroy workers' rights to organise, prevent their unions from acting in companies and neutralise their struggles.

Never before has the right to strike – an achievement of the workers that cost many decades of sacrifice, persecution, imprisonment, torture and murder – been so threatened.

In this violent onslaught against the workers, the employers, the Government and the right wing are united against the right to work and the right not to be dismissed without just cause.

With boundless cynicism, employers and the right-wing are trying to convince us of the merits of a monstrosity: the ability to dismiss workers without being obliged to reinstate them, even if the court declares the dismissal unlawful.

No, we cannot take a step backwards.

The way forward must be one of progress, social justice and development.

And a solution that workers will demand, with their unity and strength, in the General Strike: the withdrawal of the labour package!