Jon Henley is travelling through Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece to hear the human stories behind the European debt crisis. Here, an Athenian gives her take on the Greeks' plight
Europe on the breadline: live tour ? interactive
Kizbot, a frequent and eloquent commentator on Comment is Free, lives in Athens and writes in with her view of the crisis ? and its consequences for her neighbours:
I don't have to go far to see how deep the cuts have bitten into the lives of all Greeks. My next-door neighbours, Maria and Antonis, are a couple in their mid 30s. He is a civil servant with the ministry of finance. His salary has been cut by 56% and his take-home pay reduced by nearly ?1,000 to just ?750 a month. He says he expects it to be reduced further and believes he'll be lucky if his salary stabilises at around the ?500 mark.
Maria was made redundant in August. She is entitled to full unemployment benefit for up to 12 months, plus another two months on half benefit. After that, she is entitled to nothing from the state. She either finds work or she will have no income at all. And Maria is, in some ways, quite lucky because she has enough national social security stamps to receive a year's worth of benefit. Many get no more than six months.
The two-day general strike this week is not because the Greeks are in denial about the crisis, or the need to make cuts. The fury is at how the crisis has been handled by a weak government meekly acquiescing to all the Troika's demands, and leaving Greeks with virtually no workers' rights.
The latest austerity measures to be voted on on Thursday will include the abolition of collective bargaining rights, one of the last barriers to abolishing the minimum wage. The Troika and the Greek government have held the people to ransom with the threat of a default and the chaos and poverty that would ensue. Looking around Athens today, at the spiralling poverty, rising prices and endless strikes, it's hard to imagine how a default could be worse.
? If you have a story to tell, know a person I should talk to or live in a place you think I should visit, please contact me: jon.henley@guardian.co.uk, or @jonhenley (the hashtag for this venture is #EuroDebtTales)
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/oct/19/europe-on-breadline-default-worse
Canary Islands Debit cards Pop and rock Annuities Alexander Litvinenko Liverpool
No comments:
Post a Comment