Worried Greeks Fear Collapse of Middle Class Welfare State
Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times
Boxes of papers in the main room of the central tax office in Athens. The Greek government is raising taxes and slashing pensions and salaries for state workers.
By RACHEL DONADIO Published: September 24, 2011
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ATHENS — Sitting in the modest living room of the home she shares with her parents, husband and two teenage children, Stella Firigou fretted about how the family would cope with the uncertainties of an economy crashing all around them. But she was adamant about one thing: she would not pay a new property tax that was the centerpiece of a new austerity package announced this month by the Greek government.
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Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times Stella Firigou, 50, said she could not pay a property tax.
“I’m not going to pay it,” Ms. Firigou, 50, said matter-of-factly, as she lighted a cigarette and checked her ringing cellphone to avoid calls from her bank about late payments on a loan. “I can’t afford to pay it. They can take me to jail.”
While banks and European leaders hold abstract talks in foreign capitals about the impact of a potential Greek default on the euro and the world economy, something frighteningly concrete is under way in Greece: the dismantling of a middle-class welfare state in real time — with nothing to replace it.
Since 2010, the government has raised taxes and slashed pensions and state salaries across the board, in an effort to rein in the bloated public sector that today employs one in five Greeks. Last week, the government announced it would put 30,000 workers on reduced pay as a precursor to possible termination and would cut pensions again for nearly half a million public-sector retirees.
A clerk in her local town hall, Ms. Firigou, like all public-sector workers, took a precipitous pay cut last year — in her case to less than $1,300 a month from $2,000 a month — as the government slashed wages to meet the terms of its foreign lenders. Her husband, who sells used car parts, has seen his commissions drop. Her mother’s pension was cut to about $800 a month from around $920.
Like many families here, the Firigous cushion the impact of such cuts and the rising cost of living with property acquired in the past. Her grandfather built the two-story apartment house in this Athens suburb, Psychiko, where the six now live, starting in the 1930s and finishing it after the Second World War. And so the new tax, probably in excess of $2,000 per year for the Firigous, stings particularly hard. “The house is the only thing we have left,” she said.
There is a lot for Greeks to swallow. Beyond the public-sector wage cuts, in recent months the government has also imposed a “solidarity tax” ranging from 1 to 4 percent of income on all workers and an additional tax on self-employed workers, who make up the bulk of the economy. It has also raised its value-added tax on many goods and services, including food, to 23 percent from 13 percent.
The economy is flagging, and it is not uncommon for even private-sector workers to see pay cuts of 30 percent or more, sometimes in exchange for a reduction in working hours.
The so-called troika of foreign lenders — the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund — is increasingly playing hardball with the Greek government, insisting it meet its deficit-reduction goals before it decides whether to release the next installment of $11 billion that Greece needs to meet expenses starting in mid-October.
Many Greeks fear a vicious circle: a death spiral of more austerity measures, further economic contraction and correspondingly lower tax revenues, making it that much harder to make a dent in the debt, pushing the country toward default in spite of the austerity. Unions have called general strikes for Oct. 5 and Oct. 19, and tensions are building.
Economists say the measures are necessary to bring down debt and modernize Greece’s economy. But the cuts have come far faster than the modernization, and the social fabric is starting to fray — if not tear. The unemployment rate, already at 16 percent, and emigration are increasing; the birth rate is dropping; and the rate of suicide is rising. The education minister recently apologized that public schools lack textbooks, and the country’s morale is flagging.
“The government is increasingly at war with the citizens,” said Jens Bastian, an economist at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy in Athens. “It is taking decisions whose consequences are not only squeezing the middle class, but threatening its very existence.”
Some private-sector workers say they have not been paid in months. “It’s illogical and unfair,” Aphrodite Korogiannaki, 38, a speech pathologist at a center for intellectually disabled youth, said of the property tax as she participated in a peaceful demonstration in Athens last week. “If I haven’t been paid for two months, how can I pay?”
A growing number of Greeks are asking that question, and increasingly their anger is focusing on the proposed property tax, the one that Mrs. Firigou insists she cannot pay.
The government has said it expects to raise $2.7 billion through the tax, which would affect an estimated 5.5 million homeowners. (There is no precise number for Greek homeowners since the country still lacks a comprehensive land register.) According to the Hellenic Property Federation, an association representing Greece’s homeowners, the tax would cost an average family between $1,200 and $2,000 extra per year.
Last week, the Socialist prime minister, George Papandreou, implored Greeks to accept the measures. “There is no other path. The other path is bankruptcy, which would have heavy repercussions for every household, for every Greek citizen,” he said. “We know it will be difficult, but now is the time for the most decisive battle of all.”
The tax would be levied through electricity bills, another source of frustration here. A failure to pay would result in the power being shut off, but the powerful union that represents the workers of the public power company has said it will refuse to cooperate, jeopardizing its implementation.
A growing chorus of members of Mr. Papandreou’s Socialist Party is opposed to the tax, and a vote on the measure scheduled to be held in Parliament this week is widely expected to be close.
Critics say the country has failed to adequately crack down on tax evasion among the wealthiest segments of society — and failed to carry out more focused cuts because it is reluctant to take on some public-sector unions that protect a small, powerful cadre of workers who have deep ties to the governing Socialist Party.
“I don’t think they know what to do,” Nikos Panoutsopoulos, 38, an archaeologist who works at the Culture Ministry, said as he participated in a demonstration in Athens last week. “Instead of fighting” the electric company union, or the train company union, he added, “they just cut salaries horizontally.”
Some of the short-term unemployed will still be expected to pay the new property tax. Faced with that prospect, a woman who gave her name only as Antonia as she waited in an unemployment center in downtown Athens burst into tears, a day after losing her job as a cleaner for the Ministry of Education.
“My husband is a construction worker, he has hardly had any work this month now due to the collapse of the construction market,” she said. “My son is 20 years old and also unemployed.”
Such stories are common in Greece today. Yet even as the country bleeds, it is not meeting the deficit-reduction targets set as terms for its bailout. According to data released by the Finance Ministry on Thursday, net revenues were $4.7 billion off target and expenses $1.35 billion higher than projected in the first seven months of 2011.
Back in her living room, Ms. Firigou said she had not seen it coming. “No one warned us,” she said. “I have no hope, not for myself, not for my children, and I am only 50.” But she said some things still make her laugh. “I can’t get it into my mind that my life is such a mess,” she said. “It’s a joke.”
Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting. |
