Reflections on Striking Workers
Just as the French last week the Greeks are striking, and definitely not for the first time. The reasons of course are mostly the same as before, in this case the proposed austerity measures of the government, a draft law that would raise the retirement age, reduce monthly payments to pensioners, and facilitate layoffs.
Louisa Gouliamaki/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Protesters clashed with riot police during a strike against austerity measures in Athens on Tuesday.
Late Monday the head of the main civil servants’ union, Spyros Papaspyros, said that the Greek people, not just the union members, would never accept the proposed changes. “They violate the law and the Constitution and affect 95 percent of Greeks — there is no way they will pass.”
The two main labor unions, evidently representing some 3 million workers, vehemently oppose the measures. Now the entire population of Greece is hardly more than three times that number, so on the face of it the union workers would seem to represent nearly all the workers — non-working men and women, school children, retirees et al. probably making up most of the remaining 7 million Greeks.
What chance does Papandreou’s government have to lower the budget deficit by cutting worker and retirement benefits when the organizations representing most of the working population will go on demanding continual work stoppages rather than accept the government’s proposals? A snow ball’s chance.
Now the principal money making “industries” of Greece are tourism and shipping. Don’t the workers at least in the tourist industry realize that any strikes will reduce the revenues from tourism? And don’t they all realize that if the shippers are made to pay additional taxes the shippers will probably pick up and operate their ships under the flag of another country?
If there ever were a case of someone, in this case a country, of shooting herself in the foot this must be it.
How has it come to pass, as in Greece, but also in Spain, in France, in California even, that to a large extent, the people seem not to have ever encountered Economics 101, or the knowledge that their own livelihoods, not to mention medical and other benefits, and ultimately retirement checks, will always depend on there being large numbers of entrepreneurs and workers who continue to grow (the tourist services and the shippers, for example) the country’s wealth,…
and that the very first task of everyone, not just the government in response to European Union pressures, ought to be to assure that this goes on happening?
This is the sad tale of our times. The gross national products of too many countries of the developed world are stagnant, or growing too slowly to permit a significant reduction in existing budget deficits, not to mention extend new benefits and services to the rising populations everywhere of the needy and the elderly.
In Greece what will happen when the government cannot fulfill its promise to the European Union, and is unable to reduce its debt, the proposed austerity measures having been rejected by the people? They cannot sell more government paper, nor print more euros.
When the checks stop coming what will the people do? These are interesting times.
But it may also be that Spyros Papaspyros is just an actor in the latest comedy, and that when his bad boy role is played out, the people will go back to work.
