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Thessaloniki Mayor Refuses Layoff Order

Thessaloniki’s Leftist Mayor Yiannis Boutaris, who earlier said he could operate the city with half its staff, now has refused government orders to lay off workers as demanded by international lenders, a stance that has other mayors across Greece considering similar resistance.
In a rare act of unity, cities and unions are refusing to comply with demands for layoffs, some 2,000 of which are scheduled by the end of the year and as many as 25,000 more next year. The employees will be put on 75 percent of already-reduced pay and almost certain to be fired after a year.
The Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) has directed Prime Minister Antonis Samaras to carry out the layoffs as a condition of more austerity measures in return for bailouts. Greece has expended a first rescue package of $152 billion and is awaiting a $38.8 billion installment that is the first in a second bailout of $173 billion. That was delayed until the government got approval last week of a $17.45 billion spending cut and tax hike plan but still hasn’t been disbursed.
In the first sign of open defiance, dozens of municipal workers in Thessaloniki staged a protest on Nov. 12. “I have been working for the city for 22 years,” one of the city administration’s 4,000 employees told Der Spiegel, which reported on the rebellion. He requested anonymity for fear of jeopardizing his position even further. “I fear for my job. All of us do.”
A few hours later, city workers and journalists packed inside city hall to observe the City Council meeting which ended with a decision to support Boutaris’s motion to disobey the central government. Boutaris said he would not send the Interior Ministry a list of workers to be dismissed.
Previous promises by the government to create a labor reserve failed miserably: While 15,000 employees should have been placed on reserve by the end of this year, fewer than 100 were transferred, most of them part-time employees, increasing the pressure from the Troika to pick up the pace of layoffs and firings.
Der Spiegel noted that in a rare show of unity in Greece’s infamously partisan politics and tense labor relations, both the national union of municipal employees, POE-OTA, and the Central Union of Municipalities, KEDE, have built up an anti-lay-off campaign. Municipal workers occupied local government offices in Athens, Thessaloniki and other major cities. In some towns, protesters used wooden boards to seal off the personnel offices that hold the names of city workers.
“Both the government and the troika need to realize that such measures decapitate an already castrated local administration,” Boutaris said at the meeting. He was criticized by a former deputy mayor of the city, Nikolaos Tachiaos, who said that, “It is disappointing to see that even mayors like Boutaris who sponsor a modernizing agenda refuse to send the lists.
He added: “Was it not Boutaris who said last year that the city of Thessaloniki can operate ‘with half the staff?’ The message they are sending is that there is a huge gap between words and actions in Greece.”
The head of the Central Union of Municipalities, Kostas Askounis, said no other branch of government in Greece has done as much cost-cutting as the cities, and that any further cutbacks will give the fatal blow to already overstretched local authorities. “More than 3,500 staff have left since 2010,” he said. “Do they want to totally destroy us? Who will teach children in municipal kindergartens? “
Tachiaos said the city’s government is overfilled with needless workers, many of whom are unskilled and offer little and were patronage hires by politicians in return for votes.  “Municipalities would hire literally everybody who came knocking,” he said. “The workers who are targeted for the reserve scheme are people with low skills, who took on permanent posts by the mayors through back channels. And they are the same people who booed the City Council politicians who appointed them.” Greek mayors are said to be considering submitting their resignations en masse, an idea to be discussed and decided on at an upcoming union meeting.
 

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