After the end of the Greek Civil War, thousands of persecuted men and women guerrillas fled to the socialist countries or were sent to exile. During that same period young people migrated from their villages to the cities – mainly to Athens where fear and terror had reared their ugly head – in order to look for a better and brighter future. One of the trades they practiced was manual labor, for example construction work.

Meanwhile, in the mid-fifties, communist prisoners started being released and also turned to construction work in order to survive. It was the one and only occupation that didn’t require them to have signed a certificate of social beliefs. They joined young people who had just reached the capital and together, using their experience in social struggles, they built unions in order to fight for better working and living conditions.

Their hard struggles and grandiose strikes lead to important achievements for the workers like social security, continuous working hours, benefits and allowances, and banning police presence from their assemblies. Meanwhile, the construction workers movement got heavily politicized by posing political demands as well as labor ones, concerning U.S. bases in Greece, the peace movement, the withdrawal of Greece from the European Economic Community, the Cyprus dispute, etc.

Construction workers were the vanguard of the labor and working class movement and set a great example of resistance and struggle in a bleak historical period.