Portside

In 2007 a group of young Greeks launched the G700 movement to protest at the typical graduate starting salary of €700 a month. By 2013 even this low pay seemed a fortune, and the organisation announced that it was disbanding: “Since the movement was founded, the future of the members of G700 has been thrown into chaos. ... What we once called the €700 threshold ... has been smashed ... €700 a month now seems like a vast sum. ... Today, our personal quest comes down to survival.”

Unemployment in Greece reached 30% at the end of last year, bringing the percentage of the population not participating in economic life (including the unregistered unemployed and students who had never worked) to 56.4%. Since 2008 wages in the public sector have fallen by 25%.

Manolis ran a small construction firm for more than 20 years. It specialised in interior finishing in commercial and industrial buildings. “I was earning as much as €6,000 a month. We were working around the clock, including weekends. Sometimes I even had to turn jobs down.” In 2010 he made his three labourers redundant, thinking that the crisis would be brief and that business would pick up in a couple of years. In 2011 he had to move house, like many Greeks, because the flat where he, his wife and two children lived was too small for his mother to move in with them; his wife had been made redundant, and they were counting on his mother’s pension of €1,000 a month to make ends meet. After hesitating for a long time, he finally closed down the company in 2012. He sold his van “for a third of what it was worth” and bought an estate car. “I was unemployed, with no benefits [the system makes no provision for independent traders whose business has collapsed], so I was planning to work in the black market. I was going to use the car to carry my materials and tools. I’d kept everything.”

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, and then he was paid only 60% of what an Austrian would have earned. “I don’t know how long I can go on. I was counting on work renovating a smart flat in the north of Athens, but they put the job off.” At the end of December he didn’t get the advance of €200 he was hoping for, on a job worth €500; he owes around €10,000 in social security insurance and as much in back tax and repayments on bank loans. Things were so bad he thought he would have to get through Christmas and the New Year without heating, until a friend gave him a portable heater and a cylinder of gas, and a neighbour “lent” him €200.

And 2014 has not started well. New austerity measures may cut his mother’s pension. “I wish you a happy New Year! And, above all, good health!” he said: like a third of all Greeks, Manolis no longer has health insurance. (In 2010 Andreas Loverdos, health minister in George Papandreou’s government, said it was a pity that “people do not die [but] go on living for several years ... after retirement.”)

In the night of 16-17 December, telephone and Internet provider Hellas Online (HOL) dismantled its call centre; by 2.30am, the offices had been emptied of equipment and furniture. This now common way of shutting up shop is known as “sudden death.” Hellas Online’s 360 employees were invited to resign their jobs, forfeiting any compensation, and be re-hired by an offshore subsidiary of HOL at a salary 20% lower and with no overtime pay. They had 48 hours to decide. One employee said that under the new contracts they are only considered to have started work once they have switched their computer on, not when they sit down at their workstation, and they are no longer paid for on-the-job training time.

For a glimpse of the future you only have to go down to Piraeus, where Chinese state-run company China Ocean Shipping Company (Cosco) has been operating part of the port facilities since 2010. Cosco began by making workers on dock II sign new Chinese-style individual contracts — a “return to the Middle Ages,” according to Greek daily Eleftherotypia. Workers would be paid €40 a day. Until then, under the 2009 collective agreement, pay had ranged from €58 to €94 a day, depending on experience and specialist skills. Cisco’s rate of €40 includes “bonuses and various allocations, including night work, paid vacation, overtime pay and travel costs.”

In November last year an Athens newspaper carried an ad from an agency in Crete for hotel “chambermaids to work unpaid, in return for food and lodging.”

In December the theatre actors’ collective agreement expired, and the employers’ organisation proposed to pay actors between €3.25 and €5.54 an hour, gross. They would no longer be paid for rehearsals.

With society shifting into survival mode, trade union demands became first defensive, then fragmented by branch or company, and have now changed into wider, sometimes vaguer, political demands — for instance that the representatives of the troika (the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund) leave Greece.

After the thousands of rallies that set the pace of life from 2010 to 2013, public mobilisation has collapsed. The unions, like Greece’s political parties, have lost credibility and are associated with the past. People ask what is the use of demonstrations when they failed to prevent the dismantling of Greece?

Yannis, a journalist with more than 25 years’ experience was earning €2,000 a month, net, until he lost his job in 2010. For a year after, he received benefits of €450 a month, and because of compensation paid by his former employer he was able to survive until January 2012, when used up the last of his savings. “I thought I would find another job quickly. As I know the small world of journalism very well, I thought my address book would come in handy. ”He received just one offer, from former colleagues who were setting up the Editors’ Daily, a self-financed newspaper run as a cooperative venture. They invited Yannis to join them, which would involve putting up start-up money of between €1,000 and €2,000, plus working for three months without pay. They said that, since journalism was ailing, “the future belongs to this kind of initiative.” 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 a salary of €1,000 a month: “After four months they stopped paying us on time. My contract expired — just like the industry’s collective agreement, going back to 2009, which nobody respected. Before the crisis, the paper had 800 employees; now there are fewer than 200. I once worked for three weeks without a day off.”

By the end of last year, 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 also agreed not to take any individual or collective action against the paper until August 2014. Yannis refused. On the grounds that he and others had rejected the new plan, the management did not pay salaries in November. Yannis said: “The atmosphere at work is terrible. The signatories, as they are called, accuse those of us who refused to sign of killing off the paper.” The workers agree only that the management are “swindlers.” The management then suggested that the paper could become a self-managed enterprise. Yannis maintains that “handing over control to the employees” is simply an excuse to pass on the paper’s debts. But the employees have accepted, because things are no better elsewhere.

[Panagiotis Grigoriou is an anthropologist and the author of La Grèce Fantôme: Voyage au bout de la crise, 2010-2013 (Ghost Ship Greece: a Journey into the Depths of the 2010-2013 Crisis), Fayard, Paris, 2013. Translated by Charles Goulden.]

Copyright c 2014 Le Monde diplomatique. Reprinted with permission. May not be reprinted without permission. Distributed by Agence Global.