World Tour: Greek labor protests

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: A World Tour special report.

Last week, strikes in Greece shut down and slowed buses, trains, and ferries, as the country’s parliament voted in a new labor law that’s supposed to increase labor flexibility. Protesters say the law will open them up to abuse from their employers.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: The country has been slowly rebuilding since a financial crisis in 2009… and this summer the government announced it would be able to pay off its debt 10 years early. But this labor law is just one indication that the country is not yet out of the woods. WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

SOUND: [Protest]

MARY MUNCY: Two weeks ago, protesters marched toward parliament in Athens, holding banners and flags for their unions. It was just a few days before the end of the public comment period for a law that would increase the allowed workday to 13 hours.

SPANOU: Overstretched, stretched schedules will lead to more workplace accidents.

Giota Spanou is with the engineers' union for a Metro line.

SPANOU: We demand seven hour work day, five days per week, 35 hours per week in total.

The government is going the opposite direction, it says the law allows more flexibility for employers in an effort to boost the economy.

Under the law, employers will pay for any extra labor, and any extra hours would be voluntary, the bill also stipulates that an employee can only work a 13-hour day 37 days a year, and can’t be fired for refusing overtime. But fellow protester Niki Chronopoulou thinks employers will abuse any new freedom.

CHRONOPOULOU: We will be living only for working, and the money that we will gain will not be enough for us to live.

Chronopoulou is the president of a union for university administrative staff.

She says wages in her industry haven’t kept up with inflation—claiming they’ve fallen 32 percent in the last 10 years.

The bill includes consequences for mistreating employees, and there is a government agency over enforcement. But protesters don’t trust the government to protect them, and they sound a lot like protesters during the financial crisis 15 years ago.

ROBOLIS: (French) Everybody feels like the state is broke, with a large deficit, a big debt.

Director of a Union Savvas Robolis told AFP in 2010 that, in his words… “everybody feels like the state is broke[n], with a large deficit and a big debt.”

And he was right.

CBS: A decade of frantic overspending has left it roughly $400 billion dollars in debt and in order to get a loan, an emergency loan, just to tide it over just to it doesn’t default on its next round of payments.

SOUND: [Protest]

Greeks in Athens protested those austerity measures frequently from 2009 to 2012 with many demonstrations turning violent.

PAPAKONSTANTINOU: The only other crisis that the Greek crisis compares with is the US Great Depression 29 to 32.

George Papakonstantinou is an economics professor at the European University Institute, and he was Greece’s Finance Minister at the start of the crisis. His government discovered the previous administration had misrepresented how the economy was doing, and began trying to correct it.

PAPAKONSTANTINOU: It was a very dark period. I signed a loan agreement for 110 billion euro in exchange for a three year initially, and then it was extended period of very harsh fiscal consolidation, austerity measures and reforms.

Over a four-year period, there was an average drop of 26 percent in earnings. Papakonstantinou says many families were living off of one person’s salary or one grandparent’s pension, which were dramatically cut in an attempt to reign in spending.

PAPAKONSTANTINOU: The difference with the US Great Depression is that while GDP fell about the-about the same in both cases, about a quarter was lost. In the US case, the rebound was much faster. In the Greek case, we still haven't quite gotten back to where we were before the crisis.

But this summer, the Greek government announced it would be paying off its debt 10 years early, and recent numbers show the economy rebounded faster after the COVID-19 pandemic than other European countries at least according to some metrics.

PAPAKONSTANTINOU: That does not mean that the problems of the country have been resolved.

The country’s purchasing power is second to last in the EU. At the height of the crisis, 1 in 4 Greeks were unemployed. Today it’s much lower bout 8 percent. For context, the current EU average is about 6 percent.

Papakonstantinou sees three main reasons the country is still behind. First, productivity remains low. That’s partly because tourism plays a big role in the country’s economic growth, but it’s an industry with long hours for little pay.

Second, he says the current recovery measures aren’t lifting many of the most vulnerable Greeks from poverty.

PAPAKONSTANTINOU: And the third problem is that, unfortunately, we didn't follow the maxim that you should never waste a good crisis, and we did not, during the crisis, reform the institutions of the country.

All of these things lead many Greek citizens to distrust the government, and he says that increases resentment.

PAPAKONSTANTINOU: And that's, that's the context in which you need to interpret the new labor law.

In general, Papakonstantinou says he’s in favor of deregulating the labor market, But he’s concerned that the current system may not be able to handle it without too much harm to an already depressed citizenry.

PAPAKONSTANTINOU: Greece is a country with many, many small businesses which are very hard to monitor, and where you're much more vulnerable and you don't have the protection of a trade union like you do in a larger firm.

Papakonstantinou says the way out probably involves increasing investment in education, high-level manufacturing, and other things that will boost the country’s productivity.

SOUND: [Protest]

Back in Athens, Parliament passed the new law last week while workers held more strikes and protests.

That’s it for this week’s WORLD Tour. I’m Mary Muncy in Athens, Greece.

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