PATROCLES, a taxi driver, had to borrow his wife’s car to ferry customers to and from Athens airport to avoid being spotted by his colleagues on strike. “I’m with them in principle but I have to earn an income,” he said. Last week Athens’s 14,000 taxi-drivers—5,000 more than are needed, according to Sata, their union—wrapped up a strike that had lasted for almost three weeks, infuriating summer tourists and giving Greece’s battered reputation a further kicking. The cabbies, already losing business as recession-hit Athenians switch to public transport, were angry about a scheme that aims to liberalise their closed-shop by lifting the ceiling on taxi licences.
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The Economist
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