By the end of this century, the global population is predicted to fall for the first time since the Black Death. In every continent the pitter-patter of babies’ feet is being replaced by the clanging of walking sticks as family size shrinks under the immense pressures of working life. Faced with a shortage of workers and a growing pension-age population, the ruling class are worried about what they are calling the ‘demographic transition’.

Last August, the Minister of Labour Adonis Georgiadis outlined the New Democracy government's new bill on labour and insurance issues, which will shred the most fundamental remaining protections for workers. In the words of the minister himself: “our goal is to make working relations more honest between us [i.e., workers and the bosses]”, explaining that much of what the bill codifies is already happening, informally. He put his intentions explicitly: to give intensifying exploitation of the working class full weight of the law.