I know that Greece has had economic woes for some time, but I was surprised to learn that the average Greek worker puts in more hours per year than the average American and significantly more than the EU average. With the recent approval of six day workweeks in Greece, while conversations about shifting to four day workweeks are occurring elsewhere in the world, I’m curious as to what has led to this situation occurring?
In: Economics
The cost of living increasingly rising, and the salaries being stuck to low levels. People need to work long and hard to be able to pay rent and basic expenses. The work culture can be brutal, especially e.g. in the tourist sector. I have friends in the tourism industry that are only allowed something like 2 days off per month, from May until October (tourist season). A corrupt government/state plays a big role in this too. (there’s little hope to get help if you your boss is pushing you to your limits)
While the theme of poor people having bad living conditions is pretty prevalent everywhere, it seems like in Greece the government sucks in particular.
It’s high cost of living with low wages, while being stuck in a bad spot with little to sell
When Greece was out of money, we forced them to sell their good assets to us (Germany) and to keep their bad assets. Also we e.g. forced them to no longer write “fresh milk” on their groceries so our stale milk could compete better.
We did that saying that we want them to be better off after the crisis.
Also a lot of good people left Greece during that time to work elsewhere for better money. Now they generate wealth somewhere else and Greece needs workers / experts.
This is what I did notice without explicitly concerning myself with that topic.
One does not discuss the Greek economy without mentioning the cows…
https://www.boredpanda.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/corperation-economies-explained-cows-ecownomics-36.jpg
Anecdotally as a fairly frequent tourist to Greece, people in that industry work very long hours. Same guy selling boat tours at 10am and 10pm just for example. I imagine that balances out though in the low season. Point being that it’s not a lack of effort on the people’s part but something else as others have pointed out.
Latest Answers