Hundreds of Greek civil servants demonstrated in Athens on April 17 against plans by the government to axe thousands of state jobs this year to meet austerity goals on the orders of international lenders.
Archaeologists, hospital workers and other public staff gathered outside the civil administration ministry which is tasked with planning the layoffs, many of which will be aimed at problem workers who don’t show up to work, have faked their credentials, are disciplinary problems or have committed felonies, including murder, but are still on the job.
Under the Greek Constitution, it’s veritably impossible to fire public workers for any reason, but Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said that doesn’t apply to the mergers and consolidations of agencies that would reduce the need for workers.
The government has said the health care system was riddled with bloated costs and corruption, as it reduces state spending to trim the debt.
Hospital workers, who had earlier protested outside the health ministry, carried a banner calling Greece’s international bailout deal “harmful to your health,” while another read, “Take these measures and go away.”
The health sector has faced many difficulties since the government began its program to reform the economy in 2010. There have been supply and drug shortages in hospitals, cuts to staff wages, overtime pay, and jobs, resulting in understaffing, and hospitals have been shut down. Hospitals have been flooded with new unemployed who have lost their health care insurance and cannot pay for health care.
“What I am afraid of is the tsunami of poor and homeless people who flood the hospital clinics every night, and you don’t have enough time to treat them,” said nurse Zoe Florou. “And most of all, they don’t have free medical care…It is unacceptable and I cannot accept the idea that a person cannot have free medical care. Don’t they understand that this is an issue of human survival?”
The President of the Greek Hospital Workers Federation Stavros Koutsioubelis said that surgeries had to be cancelled. “We cannot operate, because the hospitals don’t have money, they don’t have supplies. Suppliers are not stocking hospitals any more. It is a vicious circle that we are fighting if we try and surpass the crisis by using state funds to support the health system,” Koutsioubelis said.
Greece has pledged to cut 4,000 state-sector jobs this year and 11,000 in 2014 to qualify for 8.8 billion euros ($11.5 billion) in loans from the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) next month. The lenders are putting up $325 billion in two bailouts that began in 2010 to help right an economy bloated with hundreds of thousands of needless workers hired in return for votes.
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