Knowledge Source

Your freedom to create wealth...

You are here: Home / Blog / The Real Greek Crisis

The Real Greek Crisis

by

Socrates

Someone was telling me that a University here in Greece had a new policy on security guards. To save money, they’re firing all the security guards, and only keeping on those with masters degrees of PhDs.

Now, I don’t know if security is a more complex business here in Greece. But I thought it was more of your Cert IV kinda skill set – not a university degree.

And you can’t imagine someone’s invested in a PhD with the hope of cracking the security guard market. Something’s going wrong here.

And I think it goes to the heart of the crisis Greece is in – when you have an educated people, unable to find meaningful work.

And I’m not joking or trying to be punny when I say it’s a tragedy.

Take Olympia. She’s been our waitress at our favourite little café here in Mykonos. She’s mid-20s, bright and articulate, speaks perfect English, and has a masters degree in Social Work…

… and waits tables for lazy tourists like me.

If you think that’s a waste of potential, it is. It’s a waste of her talents and it’s a waste of the contribution she could have made to her country.

I’m not bagging working at a café mind you. For some people it’s great. For some it ties in with their lifestyle. Some have a passion for it.

But Olympia’s got no passion for her job. If she could be working in her field, she’d toss in her apron at the drop of the hat. No, it’s the economy that holds her here.

The youth (under 25) unemployment statistics in Greece are horrifying. At last count, 64.2 percent of people of working age under 25 didn’t have a job.

That means only 1 in 3 are working. It’s a depressing stat if you’re one of the two hoping to be one of the one. The numbers are against you.

It’s a tragedy in Greece, but it’s ugly across Europe.

Euro Unemployment

This chart shows that youth unemployment is up to 56 percent in Spain, and up over 40 percent in Italy.

Only Germany have anything looking like a full employment rate for it’s youth – which again shows just how different the euro zone economies actually are from each other – and how hard it is to keep the wriggly bag of roosters that makes up the euro together.

If this isn’t a crisis, I don’t know what is. I believe the children are the future (because that’s logically true by definition). But if the future is being lumped with an erosion of productive skills as well as massive set-backs to their self-esteem, what will the future look like?

Not pretty.

Normally, it’s the unskilled that have the hardest time finding work in a struggling economy. Again, this is almost true by definition. If you don’t have particular marketable skills, it makes you less marketable.

But it’s gone further than that in Greece and continental Europe. A full 30 percent of 20-35 year old Greeks are university educated. In Spain, it’s 40 percent. It’s the most educated generation in history, and it’s all going to waste.

Think of all that knowledge and energy embodied in those young minds – all that investment – just going to waste. Spectacular fruit left to rot on the tree.

I ask Olympia if she has any regrets about studying and studying so much.

“At first, I was happy with the choice. I enjoyed the topic, and I wanted to work in the field. Now I wonder if I should have studied something that could get me a job overseas. Like finance and commerce. Maybe medicine. If I had my time again…”

The irony is that Greek needs social workers now, perhaps more than ever. Six years into recession, on a lot of measures the crisis in Greece is topping the Great Depression in the US, and is lasting longer. With more and more people out of work, Greece is at risk of running into a humanitarian crisis as well.

“Sure, there’s lot of social work to do,” says Olympia. “But who’s going to pay for it? All the municipal governments are broke. There’s no money.”

And so how did Olympia, originally from Athens, end up waiting tables in Mykonos?

English.

Here, being able to speak English gets you a lot further than any experience you have in hospitality. Olympia spent some time in the UK when she was younger, and had a knack for languages.

Today, it’s her saving grace. “If I couldn’t speak English, I don’t know what I’d be doing. I’d been looking for work for over a year in Athens, and couldn’t find anything. So I came here. But I don’t know what I’ll do when the season ends. I don’t want to think about it.”

Maybe she’ll go back to Athens and join the rest of her disaffected generation on the streets of Athens. She doesn’t look like the rock-throwing kind, but desperate times make for desperate people.

Or maybe she’ll just throw it all in and try her luck overseas. The numbers on the leakage of skilled and educated professionals out of Greece are staggering. A recent study by the University of Thessaloniki found that more than 120,000 professionals, including doctors, engineers and scientists, have left Greece since the start of the crisis in 2010.

That’s a real Brain Drain. And just when Greece could really use that talent. But who can blame them?

For some of the young here, unemployment is all they’ve known. And when you feel you can’t make a valued contribution to your society, it eats away at you. It scars you.

For their sake, and for the sake of Greece’s future, they need to get on top of this problem fast.

When your carers forget to care, and learn how to throw stones instead, you’ve got a real problem on your hands.

  • I am currently in Europe travelling and the problem is the same in Sicily,Macedonia,Italy,Spain and France.The young people cannot get jobs and thus still go out and enjoy socialising on regular basis trying to stay sane.They manage to get money from parents that are working or parents that are on pensions some money to make them feel good in a negative environment.

    Mike

  • Dear friend,
    first of all some of your figures are entirely wrong. I think you found them from some British newspapers that continually misinform their audience.
    Anyhow you write about Greece since I have been living here for over 21 years, I am a native Greek with top academic qualifications I have a very sound, objective opinion. My profession as a university professor in here enables me to come into direct contact with young students , graduates and post graduates and my opinion is absolutely realistic.
    The main reason why there is an unacceptable rate of unemployment is that most students chose a wrong professional path i.e most want to become lawyers while there is a high percentage of them in the job market!
    Olympia probably is one of them. She chose an overfilled field of profession and ended up in Mykonos as a waitress.!! Nothing wrong to do any kind of job. I used to work as a storeman/clerk while I was studuing in foreign country. However most young girls like Olympia go to Mykonos for there are plenty rich foreigners and not only wishing to entrap a husband!!! This is from confessions from other young students of mine!!!!
    So do not blame entirely the country for the current unemployment but the ones who made wrong choices and of course our politicians who do not love their own country!!!
    Regarding unemployment you should include England where 52% of its habitants have great difficulty to pay their bills e.g. electricity, gas etc
    Let’s hope for a brighter future!!
    Good on all of you!
    Professor Michail Voursoukis

    • I thought this may be the case. Many young people do not do enough research on the professional needs of industry and government and then look to fulfil the needs of the marketplace. Having visited Greece many times and only today the thought came into
      my mind to spend a little more time on Hydra in the future. My hope is for a better future
      and to achieve this outcome we need some new ideas to meet the needs of a rapidly changing
      world. The old ways don’t work anymore! Not in today’s fast changing society.

  • Which genius thinks over educated youngsters in mindless occupations is only a Greek or european problem. It happens in all countries around the world including Australia. And let us not forget that youth unemployment is a huge problem around the world and the specific country % differences are often not as far apart as the state massaged statistics lead you to believe.

  • Brian James

    I too am holidaying in Greece, in the southern Mani region. A brief observation;
    in the cafes in this beautiful region, most of the staff are young Albanians, second generation
    Greeks. The locals say the young Greek’s won’t do these jobs. It’s the same in the olive oil
    business here. Most companies are German owned with Albanian workers.
    While we have experienced wonderful service, in some places, grumpiness and indifference has been common.

  • when you talk about unemployment rates, work is creating something that someone else wants, like a farmer creating food, a factory creating goods, a waitress serving tables etc. The huge ‘newstart’ unemployment industry that herds the unemployed around in circles looking for non existing jobs doesn’t benefit society, and they all should be counted as unemployed, along with the 5 % of society on permanent sickness benefit, the 60,000 government employees that labour hired in a single term in Qld, (china before mao ran on 20,000 public servants without telephones or computers)
    If they aren’t creating something of value, they’re unemployed.
    Like Clive Palmer says, none of them could run a tuckshop, but his solution is to sell our minerals faster, which didn’t work for Nauru. We’re training so many accountants to cope with our increasingly convoluted tax laws, but counting money doesn’t make money, they’re like another layer of govt.
    South Korea turned a bare land with no infrastruture into a vibrant economy while other countries have mismanaged their wealth into poverty, It’s not hard, you just have to organize society into useful work, a concept the government doesn’t understand.

  • christina

    I feel so sorry for everyone in Greece, it really is a sad thing. I hope things will get better for them

  • another point worthy of mention, industry’s are closing all around us but KRudd says that education will save us, but as you point out;
    ‘A full 30 percent of 20-35 year old Greeks are university educated. In Spain, it’s 40 percent. It’s the most educated generation in history, and it’s all going to waste.’

  • Mickey

    simon has a lot to say. but Abbott isnt better as matter of fact they both shit !!!
    Australian Products should be world class i support 100% in making things not sending all manufactured jobs overseas… and people in jails shouldnt get computers and internet, but instead sent to do slave labour like old days to repay society, apparently a prisoner costs as much as an asylum seeker to maintain i dont see why they are locking up innocent people who will contribute rather then be a burden to society. all this bullshit issue isnt a grain of sand in the ocean say i rather 15000 new immigrants that will work into our society then, 15000 prisoners do 0 work fck the rehab make then dig tunnels for infrastructure.

  • What a terrible mess we have created across the world with all the borrowing and now the inability to repay these crushing loans. How did we get into this state?? The tragedy is that future generations will be left paying for our greed and generations of kids will never work. My thought is that we really need to concentrate not on jobs so much, but rather on entrepreneurialism. Teach people how to start businesses for themselves rather than wait for the non existant ‘jobs’. Entrepreneurs then create the very jobs we need going forward.

    Ann Andrews CSP. New Zealand