Greek Seaside Town Highlights Unemployment Drama

ABC News ^ | 13 February 2014 | Nicholas Paphitis

[Lorianne]

For Perama, the ships have sailed.

This working class town at Athens' western tip once hosted some of the busiest shipyards in Greece, a maritime country with one of the world's biggest shipping industries.

Wages were good and jobs plentiful. Apartment blocks were built quickly along a steep, sea-facing hill from whose heights 2,500 years ago a Persian king watched the destruction of his invading fleet off Salamis island, in one of history's most famous naval battles.

But over the past four years, all that changed as the country went through an economic freefall comparable with the Great Depression of the 1930s. This town of 30,000 people exhibits some of its worst symptoms.

Some 70 percent of the local shipping industry has shut down. Unemployment is 45 percent, far above the nationwide rate of 28 percent, itself a record figure, according to the latest figures released Thursday. About 95 percent of former shipyard workers are jobless.

Now, most say, only government aid can save the town.

"The shipyards are dead, nothing's happening there," Mayor Pantelis Zoumboulis told the AP. "Unfortunately, we linked our lives with the shipyards. So when they went down, our town lost its life."

Zoumboulis was himself employed in the yards during the 1970s, when up to 5,000 people worked daily on the two-mile strip between the mountain and the

[NonValueAdded]

Greek labor costs are about 30 euros an hour, compared with 5 euros in neighboring Turkey.

Well, right now labor earns zero euros an hour so why don't they come back and work for 4?

[clee1]

Thus is an exemplar of a liberal utopia.

Everything is wonderful until you run out of other people’s money.

[catnipman]

This is what happens when socialist governments run out of other peoples’ money.

[pepsionice]

I’ve been to Greece twice in my life (vacations). I’d strongly recommend Americans....if they have the time or means...to take ten to fourteen days, and go off to grasp the real meaning of a screwed-up economy, socialist values, and corrupt politics.

I’d almost say that it’s a reality show, with four-hundred channels at work. Tourists come in....spend their money....and all you have to do is pretend to be some tropical paradise with plenty of booze flowing and clean beaches....and you got a money-maker. Yet, they just can’t run something like this....without corruption or massive social pay-outs. Everything they build....is two hundred-percent over the normal cost value. Houses stand there in the midst of construction....for ten to fifteen years. They’ve got tons of farmland, yet can’t really grow enough to support their own country.

[Nip]

Proof positive at a bailout or a haircut don’t make any changes.

BTW - I understand that Germany is fighting tooth and nail not to bail out Greece for the third time in almost as many years.