The outcome of the efforts to date, at any rate, has been sobering, despite everything the Papandreou government has done. It has trimmed the salaries of government workers, increased taxes considerably, raised the retirement age and publicly denounced tax evaders. Nevertheless, the country is still on the brink of disaster. There is a growing sense that it was all for nothing, says Dimitrios Daskalopoulos of the SEV employers' association, "and that we are back where we started."
Daskalopoulos doesn't believe that the government did everything it could. In fact, he says, it failed in its most pressing task: reforming the massive government bureaucracy.
His attack is directed against labor leaders like Nikos Fotopoulos, 48. He is a union leader with the partially state-owned electric utility DEI, a former Trotskyist and, for the last 33 years, a member of Papandreou's PASOK Party. "We aren't eating with silver spoons here," Fotopoulous, an electrician by trade, says defiantly. His office is decorated with posters of Che Guevara, Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky.
Since 1999, his union has received close to €31.3 million in direct and indirect financial subsidies from its employer. In a particularly absurd twist, the utility has paid the union €115,000 in the last three years for demonstrations -- against its own shareholders, and against the government and its austerity measures.
Companies like DEI or the partially state-owned Hellenic Petroleum are still viewed as workers' paradises. The roughly 2,500 employees of the oil company are paid 17.8 monthly salaries a year, and even drivers and doormen earn annual salaries upwards of €90,000. Chairman Tassos Giannitsis nonchalantly attributes the high salary levels to his company's "highly specific business and substantial dependence on international price and profit margins." Besides, he adds, personnel costs make up less than three percent of revenues.
Many Greeks are angry about the special treatment of government employees. While labor representatives like Fotopoulos staunchly defend the many benefits enjoyed by workers in government-owned businesses, the draconian austerity measures have plunged the rest of the population into an economic crisis that has brought hardship to many people.
Spiegel online
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