Throughout recent years, activities of legislative body were in most part focused around issues that were artificially problematized. As a result, pseudo discourses obscured actual political demands. This practice shows us that up to this date political will for governing bodies to administer real social-economic policies oriented on common wellbeing is nonexistent.

Society itself, with the assistance of various groups and professional unions, identified problems that need immediate attention. We are calling for your action to start working on resolving the following issues:

1. As a consequence of labor policies that disregard the worker, according to official statistics, 212 people had died and 691 had been injured at a workplace in only four years from 2011 until 2015; at the same time, a great number of other cases of heavy industrial accidents and professional diseases were left unreported. Creation of effective labor inspection is preconditioned by the workers’ extreme deprivation of civil rights and their families’ crude existence. It is the demand of workers, labor unions, activist groups, and NGOs, that the year 2017 be the last stage that ensures a whole course of reforms with the purpose of creating a functionally flawless and effective labor inspection.

2. As a result of deregulation policies administered in 2005-2006, information about consumption and assimilation of environment and resources was left unexposed to citizens’ and laborers’ attention. The process was moved to government and business control. This led to a massive rise in environmental damage, pollution of air, land and water. We, as groups working toward green politics, demand that control instruments on the environmental sphere of government be reestablished. This includes a mechanism for evaluating environmental influence during mining. This will involve the laborers and local population in the decision-making process as political subjects, and will make them equal with the government and employer/investor.

3. In recent months, students started disclosing fallacious structure of the education system, which fails to generate knowledge. The main appeal is a fundamental education reform – a written acknowledgement in constitution about the priority of science and education. This will determine funding of the department in relation with the whole internal product. We call for action in order to resolve the issue of university’s direct budgetary financing. We demand increase in education accessibility, reformation of the student government model, growth in the number of student dormitories and their amenities, creation of a government program for internship and employment.

4. When directing policies of labor, employment and healthcare, that are conventional to socially-oriented government, women’s fundamental necessities need to be recognized. Universal healthcare, along with labor and employment politics, has to become gender-sensitive and appropriately serve women’s needs.

It is important to examine alternative, non-neoliberal views of economic model, which will be focused on economic growth oriented on wellbeing. The first step to this should start with progressive taxation, regulation of financial sector, and annulment of economic freedom act.

5. As a result of ten years of merciless pursuit of drug users, the idea matured in society that the current drug policy in the country needs to be fundamentally reconstructed. Rigorous approach of police reduced the users’ health, as well as their economic and social status to catastrophic state. It is time for drug policy to become part of healthcare and social politics; it is time for this issue to be replaced by care paradigm instead of punishment, because drug addiction is a health problem, not a criminal offence.

Therefore, the main demands of the manifest “Direct Real Politics” are:

1. Creation of effective labor inspection;
2. Development of principles of green economic politics;
3. Fundamental education reform;
4. Inception of wellbeing-oriented economic growth;
5. Retraction of repressive drug policy

We, as representatives of activist groups and NGOs, present the above-mentioned demands to the newly elected legislative body as discontent and inevitable requirements that were accumulated in people throughout recent years. They need an urgent response from the side of Georgian government.

Join us, and with the united chain of issues, let us show the authoritative body that it is time for real change.

The manifest is signed by:

• Human Rights Education and Monitoring Center (EMC)
• Georgian Trade Unions Confederation
• Green Fist
• Women’s Gaze
• Self-Organization Network
• Auditorium 115
• Tbilisi Solidarity Network
• White Noise Movement
• Young Greens

Share