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Greek Lifetime Job Guarantee In Peril

Greek workers at one of the seemingly endless protests and strikes against austerity measures
Greek workers protest austerity measures

With the coming firing of 15,000 workers, it seemed that Greece was finally going to bend to demands from international lenders to reduce its bloated public workforce – except that it’s going to hire 15,000 younger workers to replace them.
Still, the government said it will pare the number of civil servant jobs enough through attrition and retirement – and, for the first time, the firing of those who are problem workers, to meet a goal of 150,000 fewer workers in the next two years.
The problem has been that Greek workers, under the Constitution, enjoy lifetime jobs and can’t be fired for virtually any reason – including faking credentials, not coming to work at all, committing murder, being insubordinate, or just sitting on their hands at their desks, smoking and drinking coffee and refusing to work.
Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, whose New Democracy Conservative party, along with the PASOK Socialists – now partners in an uneasy coalition government along with the tiny Democratic Left but longtime rivals – took turns over the previous 40 years hiring hundreds of thousands of needless workers in return for votes.
That helped create a staggering $460 billion debt and 15.1 percent that have now come down to $376 billion and 6 percent, not including the cost of recapitalizing state banks brought to the edge of ruin by a scheme that imposed 74 percent losses on investors and bondholders.
But now, as the German magazine Deutsche Welle (DW) reported in an extensive analysis of the Greek civil service structure, the government looks determined to regain control of a runaway system that was put into place in 1911 to prevent political parties from firing public workers and hiring cronies every time there was a new administration.
It’s gone from one extreme to the other though, as DW noted, citing a case reported in the Greek media a police officer who in 2008 killed a 15-year-old and received a life sentence still gets 30 percent of his salary – although he’s sitting in prison. And this, the report claimed, was not an exception.
“Changing the status for civil servants and their right to a certain salary can only be done by the police’s disciplinary council,” journalist Maria Psara, who had broken the story, told DW. Her research had shown that the lawyer of the policeman in question had managed to delay proper discussion of the case. Only once the story got picked up by the media did the disciplinary council convene for a meeting to discuss the case, the Athens journalist explained.
With the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) demanding more reforms, including the layoffs, the government has seized an opening to end a taboo of getting rid of public workers at the same time austerity measures have created a record 27.2 percent jobless rate in the private sector.
The cases of abuse are making it easier, including what DW said was talk of two city officials who ordered the killing of the mayor of a northern Greek town, got arrested, and still receive half of their former salary, or that of a former financial director of the city of Thessaloniki who is continuing to receive 25 percent of his salary, although jailed for embezzlement. There even is a civil servant who played truant for 10 years, and still received his full pay check each and every month, the report added.
“Firing civil servants is not an austerity measure in itself, but rather the first step of more comprehensive structural reform,” political analyst and former government spokesman Dmitris Tsiodras told DW.
“So it’s not about saving 300 million euros ($390 million) by laying off 15,000 people – instead it’s about replacing unqualified employees with younger and more efficient people,” he added.
The problem is not the state apparatus itself, Tsiodras believes. It’s rather the fact that many civil servants got their jobs not due to their qualifications, but because they had the right connections to the right people.
Until a few years ago, the government didn’t actually know how many employees it had. Only in summer 2010 did then-Finance Minister Giorgos Papaconstantinou have all state employees registered, and ended up with a count of some 768,000 people – not including local government jobs. By now, this number has reportedly been reduced to 644,000, due to pressure from the Troika.
“The state apparatus resisted reforms – there was a fear of what’s new,” Tsiodras recalled. The pervasive mentality, he added, is of equalizing everything, which leads to ambitious and efficient employees getting the same salary as those who are lazy. This is what the government is now trying to change, he explained.
It remains to be seen whether turnover in the public sector will bring about the change needed. Psara is skeptical – she thinks there’s a danger of a new system developing, in which civil servants will again be at the mercy of party interests.
That state employees who broke the law can expect consequences is perfectly legitimate, Psara said. But she added that, “We have to be careful that we don’t head to the other extreme.” She postulated a scenario where innocent people end up on trial due to false accusations. “They would need many years to achieve receive justice and regain their reputation. That’s hardly what the government is aiming for,” she said.
For the Troika, time is of the essence: A promise to cut 15,000 civil servants by the end of 2014 is a precondition for the next 8.8 billion euro ($11.5 billion) installment of bailout money for Athens.

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