The Full Catastrophe (18 page)

While most public employees were having to get used to lower living standards, they were still as a whole doing a lot better than workers left to fare for themselves in the crippled private sector, where, for many, work conditions may have made a Chinese factory
job enviable. The great majority of the many unemployed Greeks were sufferers of the private sector. Even those who retained their jobs saw working conditions swiftly deteriorate. Only half of Greek companies paid their workers on time, according to one 2013 study, and when they were paying, salaries were often very low. Even after the public worker wage cuts went into effect, college graduates in their late twenties with government jobs earned nearly double the salary of similarly qualified peers in the private sector, where salaries were severely diminished as a consequence of the high unemployment and deregulated labor market. One out of five salaried private sector workers earned less than 500 euros a month, the Greek labor minister announced in 2013. The relatively disadvantageous circumstances for private sector workers stirred resentment, and many Greeks favored the dismantling of public sector privileges. “It is unacceptable that private sector employees be treated as second-class citizens,” the
Athens Review of Books
wrote in an open letter to the Troika in 2011. “Why the difference? Because the Greek political system secured its grip on power by continuously expanding the public sector; it is thus understandably reluctant to downsize it. But enough is enough! For how long will the Greek taxpayers foot the bill for this inflated and dysfunctional public sector that impedes private economic activity and the provision of public goods?”

Despite the civil servant job protections that fueled this sentiment, the public sector in Greece did in fact shrink considerably. That was because, early on in the crisis, tens of thousands of public workers retired early in order to protect their pensions from the effect of wage cuts. The shedding of these workers didn’t save the government much money, since there was an inverse relationship between the number of employees remaining on its payroll and the number of pensioners it had to support. Nevertheless, the withering of its personnel put the Greek government on track to meet one of the Troika’s central demands—a reduction in the number
of public workers by 150,000 by the end of 2015. The Troika, however, was not going to allow Greece to carry out the cuts through attrition alone. In 2013, as a condition of unlocking bailout loan payments it had withheld due to its dissatisfaction with the Greek reform effort, the Troika demanded Greece choose 15,000 workers deemed unqualified, negligent, or unnecessary and fire them. In exchange, the government would be able to hire an equal number of new workers based on their qualifications and usefulness. This was meant to improve the quality of the public bureaucracy.

Since the improvement, however, would be coming at the expense of existing employees, no one in the Greek public sector unions seemed to appreciate the potential societal benefits of injecting new blood into the workforce. Municipal workers’ unions were particularly theatrical in their opposition to public worker firings, storming the gates of parliament or occupying town halls around the country. I witnessed one such occupation in a suburban town hall outside Athens. The workers excitedly discussed their resistance strategy—work stoppages, additional strikes, legal action—while in the main meeting room, many of them smoked and some of the men drank
tsipouro,
a pomace brandy. The town hall seemed to have been converted into their personal hangout spot. On another occasion, in the city of Trikala in central Greece, burly union heads burst into municipal offices, shut off the lights, and commanded everyone to leave. “This is a decision of the workers,” one of the union members shouted. When one office worker, a woman who wanted to complete some clerical task, tried to turn the lights back on, the union head began screaming. “You should be ashamed,” he said, slamming his hand on a desk. “Jackasses!” he added. “No one is working. Out!” Another time, when I was on the island of Lesbos, I witnessed a protest of city sanitation workers who arrived in front of the town hall in the local fleet of garbage trucks, honking the horns and blaring sirens as if to generate some kind of primitive air-raid alert. Seeing this, I thought
the workers’ willingness to use public property—whether town halls or garbage trucks—for their own purposes suggested they considered themselves to be the public.

By the summer of 2013 and into the following year, public employees around the country targeted for potential layoffs engaged in coordinated rebellion. Public doctors walked out of hospitals. School guards tried to burst through riot police lines into government offices. The laid-off cleaning staff of the finance ministry—the “cleaning ladies,” as they came to be called—set up a semipermanent protest camp outside the ministry, clashing often with riot police. At two prominent public universities in Athens, administrative employees went on strike through the duration of the first term of 2013, locking down campus buildings in order to keep professors and students from entering.

One afternoon in November, I visited a meeting of striking administrative employees at Athens Polytechnic, one of Greece’s most esteemed universities—though, when I visited its abandoned, very concrete main campus on the outskirts of Athens, I thought it would make a good setting for a movie about the apocalypse. Though the colonnades of idyllic American colleges are modeled on the classical, Hellenic forms, one doesn’t tend to find such eulogizing picturesqueness on Greek campuses, where communist and other far-left student groups reign and graffitists decorate accordingly.
WE DON
’
T RECOGNIZE THE DEBT
.
NOT A SINGLE SACRIFICE FOR THE PLUTOCRACY
. In a campus auditorium, I found hundreds of administrative employees sitting under a small portrait of Jesus hung high on the wall above the podium. The mood was jittery. That morning, the government had published a list of 399 Greek university administrative employees who faced potential firing after faring poorly in an evaluation. The workers were discussing their next course of action. Most of them supported the status quo—a simple extension of the campus occupation—but one among them, a bearded, avuncular-looking man, approached
the podium and suggested that some return to work and immediately implement a work stoppage instead. This would represent a softening of their stance, because it meant reopening the buildings. There were jeers in opposition to the proposal. Arguments broke out in the crowd. Groups of angered workers stood as if fans at a soccer match arguing with the referee. “We can’t turn back now!” It was hard to decipher full sentences amid the din of tempers. Cigarettes were lit to calm nerves.

There was a further issue of contention. The employees were conscious that they had come under heavy criticism in the Greek media because they had continued to receive paychecks during the long duration of their strike. This had occurred because the striking administrators controlled the university payment system. A further proposal was floated to cut off further paychecks, not only for themselves, but also for all university personnel, effective at the end of the month. That would include all the professors, who, after initially striking in solidarity with the administrators, had decided they wanted classes to begin. One woman approached the microphone and declared that she couldn’t bear the weight of suspending paychecks for everyone right before the holidays. “Just because my house is burning doesn’t mean the neighbor’s house should burn too,” she said. Passions arose and the din returned. “Don’t you all see what’s happening?” one woman screamed in response before storming outside and taking deep, consoling drags from her cigarette. Fault lines seemed to be appearing between those who were on the list of people slated for potential firing and those who were not, the latter of which seemed to be losing their militancy. The workers nevertheless voted overwhelmingly to continue striking and stop all university paychecks. After the meeting, I spoke with the vice president of the administrative workers’ union, a petite blonde in cowboy boots named Katia Papanikolaou. She was on the list. “We’re playing for everything,” she told me. “We have nothing to lose,” she added. “We’re at war.”

The next day, I saw Papanikolaou on campus again talking to a group of students in the school of mechanical engineering. Until then, communist student organizations had been occupying campus buildings in solidarity with the administrators. But an increasing number of students, concerned they would completely miss the school term, were pushing for classes to begin. Papanikolaou and other administrators were therefore dispatched in order to enlist the students’ continued support. In a voice strained by cigarettes and the passion of repeated union meetings, she urged the students to fight on, not for the workers’ sake, but for their own. The administrators’ strike was not intended to inhibit their education, she said, but rather to rescue it. After all, how could they register for classes without the administrative workers? Their historic institution wouldn’t be able to function. “Education must remain so that minds remain open,” she said in a pleading voice. The students listened to her in silence, a rare respect at such meetings, reserved for occasions when someone from the working class came to speak. “Education is the foundation of our society,” Papanikolaou went on. “Keep doing whatever you can. Not for us. We’re out. For you. You don’t want to be in our position tomorrow.” It was righteous rhetoric, which I found to be lacking in lofty intention and motivated by a naked desire for self-preservation. I expected some students to perhaps call her out on this. But who were the students to question one of the
ergazomenoi,
especially one whose job was under threat due to the Troika? The students applauded, seemingly convinced.

At the time, Athens Polytechnic was marking the fortieth anniversary of a bloody student uprising against the repressive, American-backed military dictatorship. Several commemorations were to take place, including a protest march by leftist groups to the American embassy. The administrative employees married their strike to the anniversary theme of “Bread, Education, Freedom.” In a statement read aloud over university speakers on the
anniversary day, the administrators said theirs was a struggle not only to preserve the right to work, but to stop university education from becoming a mechanism to produce “narrowly trained, cheap hands of labor” for big companies that “salary the brightest minds for the business of the depreciation of human existence.” The administrators, moreover, had done whatever they could to challenge the face of repression, to resist a force that “although not wearing a military uniform nevertheless creeps all around us, humiliating humanitarian ideals.”

The university administrators were largely successful in their resistance to the layoffs, and the schools eventually all reopened for classes. When Syriza took power at the beginning of 2015, the threat of imminent dismissals of university administrators and all other public workers immediately dissolved. The new leftist administrative reform minister, furthermore, vowed to reinstate thousands of public workers the previous government had managed to dismiss despite the mass resistance. In addition, Syriza announced, the old state broadcaster, ERT, would be reopened. Upon learning that they’d be rehired, laid-off public workers rejoiced. The finance ministry “cleaning ladies,” who had until then maintained a protest encampment outside their workplace, put on red rubber gloves and celebrated in the streets. “You’ve been fired!” they yelled in reference to members of the previous government.

Around the time of the anniversary of the Polytechnic uprising, Mitsotakis, the administrative reform minister, sent out a tweet: “Albeit late the murderers of the mayor of Pangaio were fired today period.” It was nearly four years after the shooting.

The shooter’s wife had dreaded this moment. During my trip to Pangaio the preceding summer, I visited the small town where she and her husband had made their home. The place was called
Chortokopi, after a former Pontic Greek settlement in what is now Turkey, in the mountains south of the Black Sea city of Trabzon. One evening in Pangaio, I drove up to Savvas Saltouridis’s home, which like other homes in Chortokopi could have been extracted from a Las Vegas suburb. The residence was an elevated two-story house enclosed by a spacious veranda. A golden retriever panted in the front yard, beside children’s bicycles and manicured pine trees. No one answered when I rang the bell, so I stopped by the main village square, which sat in the shade of towering plane trees. There, I settled at a
kafenio.
Two youths, seemingly imploding with boredom, sipped
frapés
—iced coffee—and a few old men sat and flipped their
kombológia.
The snap of beads punctuated the sound track of locusts droning from the trees. I ordered a coffee and asked the server if anyone knew Savvas Saltouridis’s family. After a quick phone call, his brother Giorgos was informed of my presence and on his way.

As I waited, I became a bit uneasy about how Giorgos might react to my visit. A day earlier, I had tried to visit Saltouridis and his colleague Monos in prison, but neither wished to see me, according to the warden. Now, a question ran through my mind: Did the police ultimately confiscate that Uzi? A red pickup truck pulled up, and from it emerged a brawny man with sun-darkened skin. He walked toward me with a beefy gait that would have been daunting had it not been for the mitigating influence of a beer belly and peaceable brown eyes. “I would have come sooner,” he said, “but I was just getting a haircut.” We sat at a table and ordered a couple of coffees. I asked him how his brother’s family was doing. “My brother did a stupid thing and should pay for it,” Giorgos said. “He should be punished. But how is his family to blame? What will happen to the children? Do they need to die?” The family, he meant, needed his brother’s halved salary. Giorgos said he had done what he could to help them, but he was just a farmer with kids of his own. “Do you have any idea what the
electric bill is on that place?” he said of his brother’s house. Giorgos then showed me a 1998 photo taken of his brother in Boston. It was the first image I’d seen of Saltouridis. He was sitting on a chair, bowing a
lyra
and looking directly at the camera with a birdlike, expressionless face. His eyes seemed sunken, as if preferring to hide. A pile of dollar bills was strewn at his feet. “Do you see all that money?” said Giorgos. “It’s a lot of money.” His brother had been invited to play the
lyra
for Pontic Greeks in New York, Boston, Munich, all around the world, Giorgos said. It was with the money he earned doing this that he’d been able to build that home with the veranda, said Giorgos, who seemed to think that the house required justification. I got out my camera to take a picture of the photo for the record, and Giorgos waited patiently as I snapped a few images of it. “Make sure you get the money,” he said. “A lot of money.”