GREECE’S LOST GENERATION
Their government continues to haggle with lenders, but young people have given up hope,
ATHENS— On a recent Saturday night, several hundred students staged a protest in front of a bar. A waitress, some of the students said, had been fired for requesting overtime, and they stood outside the establishment — fittingly named Revolt — calling out workers’ slogans.
Members of a group known as Against Modern Slavery, the demonstrators were almost all younger than 30. They remained outside Revolt for several hours, soberly chanting in a square ringed by taverns and weekend revelry.
As Greece labours through seemingly endless negotiations with the International Monetary Fund and European Union, the headlines are filled with abstract lingo such as debt restructuring and tax-code reform. But gatherings of this type suggest a more existentially desperate reality for young people in this nation of 11 million.
“We remember being at the kitchen table and our parents talking about when times were good,” said Iro Pappa, a 22year-old engineering student attending the protest. “But I don’t know when we’ll experience it ourselves. How do you outrun a crisis?”
Greece’s economic woes will soon enter their eighth year, its staggering debt that began accumulating five years ago compounded by government austerity measures and the international financial meltdown of 2008. That is an eternity in the life of a young person, and Greek youths today exude a generational pessimism found in few European countries since the Cold War. Many don’t even recall a time when life was good — and lack the reasons or imagination to think it ever will be.
They have felt the effects of a decimated job market — the economy has contracted by a quarter since the crisis began — as well as the austerity measures. More than half a dozen austerity packages dating to 2010 have raised taxes on income and consumption, cut public sector jobs and unravelled welfare measures; they have continued despite the presence of a radical-left government that has promised to roll back austerity.
Disillusioned, young people are coalescing into what analysts view as a distinct social group.
“I think what we are seeing in Greece is a lost generation,” said Kevin Featherstone, a professor at the London School of Economics who is an expert on modern Greek society. “There’s a despondency about their own future and their place within Europe that a previous generation never had.”
Their protesting, he noted, may be born as much of a need for purpose as the conviction that they can change the system. The financial statistics are daunting. Youth unemployment in Greece tops 50 per cent, double the already high national average. The Greek minimum wage is calculated separately for young people, so even those who do have jobs tend to make less than their older counterparts.
An abundance of regulations also seems to target the young. This includes a requirement that freelancers, of which young people constitute a disproportionate number, pay nearly $1,000 annually for the right to be self-employed, regardless of whether they make a cent doing so.
Youth homelessness is skyrocketing, as is substance abuse. In more hardscrabble parts of town, the presence of people using intravenous drugs on the street can be jarring to outsiders who imagine the debt crisis largely as the domain of officials in Brussels.
But the despair isn’t limited to such stark examples. A hand-to-mouth existence, young people say, is the norm for a group that has never known the relief of, much less had the opportunity to save during, flush economic times.
“You know by now not to take jobs with the companies that have no cash and won’t pay you for six months or a year,” said Alex Salame, who works as a TV producer. Matters have grown bleak enough that one of the 20-something founders of a civic engagement group that was designed to pull Greece out of the crisis is considering leaving the country.
Stephania Xydia, a Cambridge-educated entrepreneur, returned to Greece in 2011to start the non-profit Place Identity. The organization and its affiliate, Imagine the City, have won international contests for their innovative proposals to reimagine a society that has been mired in bureaucracy and corruption.
But Xydia, 28, said she is close to letting go the half a dozen employees at the nonprofit because funding has dried up and no new projects are on the horizon. Then, she said, she may leave Greece.
She recalled a friend who calculated that he could survive in Athens on about $13,000 a year as a freelancer — and then found that after fees and taxes he’d be left with just $5,000.
The crisis is not limited to the young. But older Greeks have the historical memory and psychological wherewithal to ride out the tough times. They also might have some money stashed away.
A moment after Xydia spoke, a colleague, Mary Karatza, walked into the room.
“You just have to live for the now and not think about the future,” she said, a statement that would have been more convincing had Karatza not been six months pregnant.