10) GREECE SINKING DEEPER INTO CRISIS
According to a report by Panagiotis Grigoriou in the April 7, 2014 issue of Le Monde diplomatique, the economic crisis continues to deepen in Greece.
"The jobs aren't there any more. Anyone lucky enough to find work must accept whatever rate of pay they are offer," says Grigoriou.
He writes that in 2007 a group of young Greeks launched the G700 movement to protest the typical graduate starting salary of 700 euros a month. By 2013 even this low pay seemed a fortune, and the organisation was disbanding: "What we once called the 700 euro threshold has been smashed. 700 a month now seems like a vast sum. Today, our personal quest comes down to survival."
Unemployment in Greece has reached 30%, bringing the percentage of the population not participating in economic life (including the unregistered unemployed and students) to 56.4%. Since 2008 wages in the public sector have fallen by 25%.
The journalist interviewed "Manolis", who ran a small construction firm for more than 20 years, specialising in interior finishing in commercial and industrial buildings.
"I was earning as much as 6,000 euros a month. We were working around the clock, including weekends. Sometimes I even had to turn jobs down," said Manolis.
In 2010 he laid off his three labourers, thinking that business would pick up in a couple of years. In 2011 he had to move house, like many Greeks, because the flat where his family lived was too small for his mother to move in with them; his wife had been made redundant, and they needed his mother's pension of 1,000 euros a month to survive. He finally closed the company in 2012, selling his van to buy a car. Unemployed, with no benefits, Manolis planned to work in the black market, using the car to carry his materials and tools.
Manolis thought he would get by, even if he only worked five days a month; but he didn't get even that much work, except for a month building a hotel in Austria, paid only 60% of what an Austrian would have earned. Today he owes around 20,000 euros in social security insurance, back tax and repayments on bank loans.
And 2014 has not started well. New austerity measures may cut his mother's pension, and like a third of all Greeks, Manolis no longer has health insurance.
Yannis, a journalist with more than 25 years' experience was earning 2,000 euros a month until he lost his job in 2010. For a year, he received benefits of 450 euros a month, and because of compensation paid by his former employer he was able to survive until January 2012, when used the last of his savings. He received one job offer, from former colleagues who set up a self‑financed newspaper cooperative. Joining would involve putting up start‑up money of between 1,000 and 2,000 euros, plus working for three months without pay. He said no.
In 2012 Yannis got a new job at a major daily that had just found an investor, and signed an individual contract for 1,000 euros a month. After four months they stopped paying salaries on time. Before the crisis, the paper had 800 employees; now there are fewer than 200. By the end of 2013, the company owed Yannis and his colleagues five months' pay. The management put forward a rescue plan cutting salaries by 30%. Those who signed up agreed not to take any individual or collective action against the paper until August 2014. When Yannis and others refused, the management stopped their salaries.
Greece is rarely in the North American news these days. But the grim reality of the capitalist economic crisis has not disappeared.
(The above article is from the April 16-30, 2014, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading socialist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, BC, V5L 3J1.)