Austerity and Marketization at Europe’s Crisis Door: What can we learn from
Greece
Lefteris Kretsos1
Over the past four years, Greece has been "rescued" on countless occasions. Over
the past four years, state legislators across the country and supranational
institutions have launched an unprecedented series of reforms aimed at lowering
labor standards, weakening trade unions, and eroding workplace and welfare
protections. The country has become almost a byword for "structural adjustment"
and drastic labour market reforms across Europe. Financial support from the Troika
and especially the IMF has been conditional on reductions in public deficits and
public spending, initiating drastic labour market reform and a welfare state
retrenchment unprecedented in the post war period. Structural reforms and labour
market restructuring policies have been undertaken in line with the loan agreements
based on the Troika’s premise that labour market regulation and social protection in
Greece constituted a significant barrier to growth and a main driver of public debt.
Not surprisingly precarious work becomes endemic in an economic context, as that
of Greece, characterized by pressing demands for more flexibility and scarcity of
resources available to welfare for managing, regulating, and protecting individual
and collective decent work biographies. The increasingly sharp divide between
included and excluded individuals also leads to an increasing and endless
momentum of expanded economic, social and political inequalities.
No doubt Greece is not alone in this situation of increased marketization and work
precarisation. Since Lehman Brother’s collapse in 2008 and the consequent upsurge
of economic crisis more than 1000 young people in Europe join every day the ranks
of the unemployed, while the total number of unemployed across the continent has
increased by more than 10 million. Besides, Europe is hit hard by the worst
humanitarian crisis in last 60 years according to a recent statement by Red Cross.
Once more, the structural adjustment rules have conditioned a situation where the
therapy proves to be more brutal than the disease resulting in the gradual killing of
the patient.
Nevertheless, something bigger is currently at stake in Greece and this is due to two
main interrelated issues:
i)
ii)
First, the scale and pace of (de and re)regulatory change is greater in
comparison to other EU countries forced to implement radical labour
market reforms and austerity policies;
Second, the general elections that took place almost one year and a half
ago have set the radical left party (Syriza) in the second position and it
further established Golden Dawn far-right extremists as an influential
political agent across the country.
Lefteris Kretsos is a Senior Lecturer of Industrial Relations at the University of Greenwich
in London. He can be reached at L.Kretsos@gre.ac.uk
1
State repression, corruption and neoliberal economic doctrine put into action
significant dynamics of political change and feasible social unrest in the near future.
Greece could be the spark for defeating austerity policies across Europe in this
Weimar type situation, as Syriza is leading ahead of the ruling party of New
Democracy in the polls. Nevertheless, the scale of the catastrophe and despair
presented in the current working paper along with the use of the so-called theory of
two extremes (neo-nazis and radical left overarching aim is to bring chaos and
violence) by the current government coalition pave also the way to Golden’s Dawn
rise.
At this stage eradicated solidarity among working people in Europe is the only
weapon economic elites in power may comfort themselves. Myopic analyses on the
causes of the current crisis based on cultural stereotypes or philanthropic support to
populations frustrated by austerity do not pose questions progressive social and
labour movements do. The protection of democracy and the restoration of justice in
Europe demand the urgent reconstitution of trade union institutions and social
movements at a transnational scale in order to properly reject the fatalism of
precarity and social misery.