I wrote an essay that appeared in the Atlantic yesterday. Based on the research for my book on unemployment, the piece talks about the debate over Denmark in last week’s Democratic presidential debate—and how the real debate should be over Canada:
Clearly, America won’t expand its social safety net to anywhere near the scale of Denmark’s over the next president’s time in office. Judging from their rhetoric in the debate, though, Clinton and Sanders both agree that government can and should play an important role in extending economic opportunities more broadly. Canada’s approach to policy shows us some of the practical ways a country can do that—without having to go far from our roots as a New World society of dreamers and strivers.
Today’s federal election in Canada should be interesting: will Canada move in the direction of America, or vice versa? (That said, as my friend Barry Eidlin reminded me, the provinces have a lot of say in putting forward policies of their own—to help the employed and unemployed alike—and so some things probably won’t change, regardless of the outcome.)
Unfortunately, writing the headline for this post put the South Park song “Blame Canada” in my head. Here is the video, so that you can share in my pain (NSFW, obviously):
I participated in Marshal Zeringue’s Page 99 Test at the Campaign for the American Reader. The blog is based on a quote by the writer Ford Madox Ford: “Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.” New authors talk about the ninety-ninth page of their book and what it says about its larger themes. Here’s what I wrote about my book Cut Loose:
Page 99 talks about how the unemployed deal with the depression and anxiety that come from losing part of their identities. Work is central to our sense of self—it’s often the first question we ask someone we meet—and during the workday we build friendships that sustain us throughout our lives. Many of the people I interviewed felt isolated. Friends could no longer relate. Relationships with spouses and children became strained. Unable to provide the way they used to, they found themselves mired in blame and doubts.
One smart way to help the unemployed is used extensively in Canada: action centers. When a layoff hits, the government sets up a help center for the company’s workers and trains some of them to work there. Unlike strangers at a government agency, peer helpers can assist their former coworkers with a personal and personalized touch. Lynn Minick of the National Employment Law Project points out that America’s social safety net for the unemployed largely helps the assertive and self-reliant. For those who might otherwise fall through the cracks, it makes a big difference if they have someone willing to step up for them, he says.
While policies are important, they’re not enough. As I write on page 99:
Individuals internalize society’s belief that being unemployed is degrading, and their mental health and social ties suffer as a result. Regardless of how much they receive in benefits, the unemployed are less satisfied than those with jobs. Even in countries with generous unemployment insurance, the unemployed tend to die at a younger age.
Society treats the long-term unemployed—whose numbers have remained at unprecedented levels since the recession—as lazy and useless. My book focuses on unemployed autoworkers, many who had worked hard for decades and, thanks to good wages and benefits, achieved a middle-class lifestyle. Now, suddenly, they are failures. Some became suicidal because they felt they had let their families down.
Our society attacks the “takers” who live off government aid or the “pampered” union members who had the gall to attain a decent quality of life. It’s obsessed with performance and proficiency, self-improvement and success. But in a culture that values winning at all costs, the long-term unemployed are the ultimate losers. The solution, I argue, has to involve changing that culture.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Christos Gabriel and Yannis Lubovicki left the faltering Eastern Bloc and came to Greece in pursuit of a happier life. But as the energy and promise of Greece’s once-fiery economy has dwindled away, immigrants like them have experienced homelessness and hostility—as well as a peculiar yearning for the old communist ways.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Yannis Lubovicki left Poland and came to Athens in search of work. He lost his job during the Greek economic crisis and now lives on the streets.
In the Athenian neighborhood of Skouze Hill, a pair of shabbily dressed men, Polish immigrants, sit on a doorstep across the street from a supermarket, wearily asking passersby for change as they wait for store employees to throw away the day’s unsold food. Once the food has been tossed into the supermarkets’ dustbins, they will compete with the area’s other dumpster divers—ethnic Roma—for the stale bread and leftover vegetables.
When he illegally immigrated to Greece two decades ago, Yannis Lubovicki, forty-three, dreamed of a better life than what Poland—then struggling to adjust to a post-Berlin Wall world—could offer. Instead, he and his companion Christos Gabriel, fifty-three, found poverty. Now they spend their days panhandling and their nights sleeping on park benches. They survive on food from church soup kitchens and trash cans and the water from park fountains. Once a week they walk downtown to Koumoundourou Square and use the public baths there, well frequented by the homeless.
“Don’t give them any money,” says a well-dressed middle-aged woman heading into the supermarket. “They’ll spend it on wine in a split second.” If harsh, her words are perhaps true: their breath smells of alcohol, their eyes are bloodshot, and Lubovicki—the woman points to him emphatically—is timidly taking a corkscrew out of his bag.
An estimated one person in twenty is an undocumented immigrant in Greece, a country of eleven million. Many of them, like Lubovicki and Gabriel, are transplants from the former Eastern bloc. Having moved to Greece in search of the economic opportunities that an integrated, prosperous Europe once offered, they have instead struggled to survive, one of the groups hardest hit by financial crisis in Greece—itself one of the countries hardest hit by the global recession that struck in 2007. At the same time, they have been scapegoats for the country’s ongoing malaise, with high unemployment and political turmoil—along with a humiliating dose of international ridicule for the former continental success story turned basket case—feeding a brutal, anti-immigrant backlash within Greek society, just as they have in other immigrant magnets such as Italy, Malta, and Spain.
Yet in few corners of Europe have ultranationalism and xenophobia gained as much traction as they have in Greece. Golden Dawn, a far-right Greek political party, has seen tremendous growth since the economic crisis hit. In 1996, it received just 0.07 percent of the vote in national parliamentary elections; in 2012, it won 7 percent. Halting immigration is the party’s chief goal. Its leaders declare that “illegal alien-invaders” amount to an irregular foreign army, one bent on attacking the country’s social fabric and corrupting its national identity. The party’s extreme rhetoric has, in turn, fed violence, from the murder of a Greek antifascist rapper by a party member, to the stunning attack that Golden Dawn MP Ilias Kasidiaris unleashed on two leftist members of parliament during the live taping of a morning talk show. (After their argument grew heated, Kasidiaris—who has called Greece’s undocumented immigrants “human garbage”—punched Communist MP Liana Kanelli and threw a glass of water in the face of SYRIZA MP Rena Dourou.) Golden Dawn members have frequently harassed immigrants, going so far as to pose as police in order to intimidate street vendors.
Even in Athens, Greece’s cosmopolitan capital, Golden Dawn has substantial support. It won 16 percent of the vote in last May’s mayoral elections, a huge jump from its share of just 5 percent in 2010. “We have been swarming with Albanians, Pakistanis, Africans, and Eastern Europeans,” says the middle-aged woman at the supermarket, who did not give her name. “Now we have the Gypsy gangs, too.” Her once-affluent neighborhood used to be populated by high-ranking military officers and their families, but in recent years the poorer immigrant enclaves in the bordering downtown areas have spilled over here as well.
“That’s why they wanted us in Europe, “she adds—referring to wealthy northern European nations like France and Germany—“to keep the Third Worlders away from them so they can continue their petty little lives.”
Christos Gabriel and Yannis Lubovicki, undocumented Polish immigrants, survive by panhandling and scrounging in dustbins for food.
Gangling and gray-haired, Gabriel walks with a limp and speaks with a thick accent. In his halting Greek, he notes happily that he recently discovered a new hideout, a tiny covered alley alongside a newly built apartment building, where he lies down on the pavement at night to sleep. He and Lubovicki have spent the last five years living in close proximity to the supermarket and its surplus food. Until a few months ago, they had been squatting in a nearby abandoned house, but then the landlord drove them out.
Gabriel has been in the country for twelve years. Back in Poland, he lived through the early years of his homeland’s transition from communism. Post-Soviet Poland quickly reformed its economy to woo investors, privatizing its coal and steel industries and knocking down regulatory hurdles. Thanks to vigorous economic growth and rising standards of living, Polish households were optimistic and exuberant, and credit flowed easily. Gabriel, then a coal miner, decided to take out a loan to buy a two-story house in the southern Polish city of Katowice for himself, his wife, and four children.
The Polish “miracle,” however, failed to curb the country’s high levels of unemployment. Laid off and unable to find a new job, Gabriel struggled to pay his 50,000-euro mortgage. Desperate, he immigrated to Greece in 2002, joining a wave of illegal immigrants drawn by the global image of pre-crisis Greece as flourishing and full of promise. (Today, there are about 50,000 Polish immigrants in the country.) Gabriel has not seen his children since he left.
But today’s moribund Greek economy—now in its seventh year of recession—now offers little in the way of hope for Gabriel and immigrants like him. In Athens, about 5,000 undocumented immigrants live in derelict buildings unfit for human habitation. When they can find work, conditions are often extreme: migrant strawberry pickers, for example, earn $26 to $33 a day for about ten hours’ work, living in makeshift huts with no access to toilets. Meanwhile, government officials warn of a “public-health time bomb,” with large numbers of new immigrants not inoculated for tuberculosis, polio, measles, and other communicable diseases.
Until the 1990s, Greece was an extremely homogenous society. The wave of Eastern European immigrants that flooded Greece after the fall of the Soviet Union was followed by another wave of immigrants from Africa and Asia in subsequent years, gradually ratcheting up anti-immigrant sentiment among the broader population. Today, as unresolved economic and immigration problems worsen an already festering resentment; Greece continues to vie for the title of Europe’s “most racist” nation.
In recent years, the government has had some success in stanching the flow of illegal immigrants into the country, which it credits in part to an eight-mile barbed-wire fence it erected along its border with Turkey, completed two years ago. The number of illegal immigrants that the government detained fell from 77,000 in 2012 to 43,000 in 2013.
These days, Gabriel stays on constant alert for police raids—not for fear of deportation (European countries, Poland and Greece included, signed the 2007 Schengen agreement that allows citizens of each country to move and work freely throughout the union), but for fear that he may be arrested for failing to pay his bank loan back in Poland. For the most part, thought, the police tend to ignore him and other homeless immigrants.
Golden Dawn wishes it were otherwise. These foreigners must be deported, the party argues, in order to save the culture and community of the “pure” Greeks. (Ironically, in spite of his slogan of “work for Greeks only,” Golden Dawn’s leader, Nikolaos Michaloliakos, happens to own a hotel in an immigrant Athens neighborhood staffed by low-wage foreign workers.) Beyond its anti-immigration platform, Golden Dawn has argued for building closer ties with Russia at the expense of the US (particularly in regards to energy resources), erasing the “illegal” Greek debt and voiding the terms of the country’s internationally funded bailout, purging the public sector, and walling the Greek economy off from global trade.
In recent months the party’s brazen militancy seems to have backfired to some extent, with two of its leaders now in jail awaiting trial—Michaloliakos for forming a “criminal organization” and a spokesperson for gun charges. Nevertheless,Nikos Kyriakidis, a forty-seven-year-old plumber from Athens, insists that Golden Dawn is the only party that will fight against Zionism, imposed multiculturalism, and the growing erosion of Greek culture. Economic anxieties also seem to be at the root of Kyriakidis’s anger. He rails against the “scumbags” of PASOK and New Democracy—the major political parties that have long run the country—that he says destroyed the Greek economy. Although he has a quarter-century worth of work experience, right now Kyriakidis is unable to support his family. They just moved to avoid living in a part of the city that has recently seen an influx of immigrants. Kyriakidis doesn’t want his children to grow up in such a rundown neighborhood, he says.
In Greece, Eastern European immigrants tend to fare better than other immigrants in one area: racist attacks. Three weeks ago Gabriel and Lubovicki witnessed a gang of thirty young men dressed in black beating Asian immigrants. “They shouldn’t have hit them, it’s not right,” says Lubovicki, a stubby and gregarious man who fills in the silences of his tall and taciturn companion. The beating took place out in the open, in a public square with numerous passersby. Four police officers were nearby but did nothing, Lubovicki claims. Fortunately, the gang did not bother the two Poles. “It is the dark ones they are after,” he notes—that is, the Pakistanis, Afghanis, Syrians, Bangladeshis, Somalis, and Eritreans who have built up the country’s largest Asian and African immigrant enclaves.
“The men were huge—real giants,” Lubovicki adds. “If one of them punched me in the face, my head would fall off.”
Lubovicki and Gabriel sit on a street corner in the Skouze Hill neighborhood of Athens.
A group of young men walk down the street, stopping when they notice Lubovicki and Gabriel—half-drunk and reeking of alcohol—sitting on the doorstep. “I’ll give you ten bottles of wine if you kick this car door,” says one of the men. He is short and fair-haired, in his early twenties.
“Ten more bottles if you sing,” says another, a hulking man with a humpback.
Lubovicki bursts into laughter and says he can’t do it. Gabriel cracks a smile.
The young men seem to know the Poles. They, too, are immigrants—second-generation Albanian Greeks. Many of their parents immigrated to Greece after the Soviet Union collapsed. (Today, those of the country’s unauthorized immigrants who hail from the former Eastern Bloc are chiefly from Albania: in 2013 they were almost a third of all illegal immigrants arrested that year, and Albanians also comprise a majority of the country’s total foreign-born population.)
Lubovicki has a daughter of his own, now seventeen years old. (Her name is Despoina, a Greek Orthodox name; Lubovicki converted to the Greek Orthodox faith after arriving in the country.) His marriage ended after his wife, who had moved out to Greece with him, found out about an affair. “We had a brawl,” he says. “My wife left Greece in the middle of the night with my daughter.”
Things really got bad when Lubovicki lost his job during the crisis. “I haven’t worked in five years … I was a construction worker,” he says. (The construction sector—which used to employ both men, and whose workforce is a third foreign-born—has shrunk by half since 2009.) “I’ve been a vagabond all these years, sleeping on the benches of the parks.” He smirks as he admits it.
Their descent into poverty has soured their attitudes toward the free market and made the two Polish immigrants nostalgic for Poland’s communist era—however repressive it was. They would never have left Poland if the Soviet Union had not collapsed, they point out. Back then, life was good, and they lacked nothing. Thanks to the government, Lubovicki adds, he attended a trade school.
These are views shared by a significant number of older Eastern Europeans, according to a 2009 Pew survey. While those under the age of forty tend to favor the economic and political reforms their countries have gone through over the past two decades, the older generations are more skeptical. Clearly, many have painful memories of the USSR: not just the absence of freedom and dissent, but also the frequent shortages of food and toilet paper, the constant lecturing about Marxist-Leninist creeds, the degrading monotony of Soviet life. But like Lubovicki and Gabriel, some of those who grew up under communism point out that unemployment and homelessness were virtually unknown back then. Their salaries were nowhere near American ones, but the cost of living was negligible. The Soviet educational system was excellent, ranking among the best in the world.
In recent years, Poland has, like Greece before it, seen rapid economic growth. While many Poles continue to go abroad in search of the higher wages to be found out west, living standards have improved back in their home country. Lubovicki points out that his mother, a professional chef, enjoys a pension and a cozy house of her own. Meanwhile, he lives on the streets.
Lubovicki misses his hometown, a village outside Warsaw. He misses his daughter, who speaks to him by phone every other week. He misses his mother’s cooking. But he does not believe he will go back to the old country anytime soon. “My mother calls me up all the time asking me to return to Poland, but I can’t because I can’t afford it. I need eighty-five euros to renew my passport and about 200 euros for travel expenses.”
It’s not just about the money, Lubovicki adds. Born “Yannus,” he has lived as “Yannis” since he came to Greece—now half his life. “If I go to Poland, I won’t know a thing. I’ll be unable to adjust there …. I have been living in Greece ever since I came of age, how am I supposed to start all over again?” Gabriel—who used to go by the name “Yaroslav”—nods in approval.
“Have I told you I am also a mechanic for all kinds of machines and can do some plumber work?” Lubovicki says, moving on to another, more hopeful, topic. “I may find a gig like this in the future. I know the tools of the trade.”
Then his eyes light up. The sliding doors of the supermarket have opened. Employees bearing huge trash bags head for the dustbins. Lubovicki walks over to find his next meal.
Correction, September 27: An earlier version of this article misidentified the man in the first photo. It is Yannis Lubovicki, not Christos Gabriel.
Stav Dimitrοpoulos Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since.
Facebook | Twitter: @TheyCallMeStav
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Young college-educated workers have struggled to find jobs in the wake of a devastating global recession. In Greece, the European epicenter of the economic crisis, the hardship is on a whole different level: college graduates are giving up on the careers they planned and heading home — to work on the family farm.
Photos from the farmers’ market in the Greek coastal city of Kalamata, where veteran farmers sell vegetables alongside college graduates. Young Greeks like Demetra Psonis (above left) had no luck finding jobs after the country’s economy collapsed. Photos courtesy of Eleftheria
In the last several years, stories have abounded in the American press about the struggles of recent college graduates. Unable to find jobs, overeducated young workers end up waiting tables, brewing espressos, and living with their parents. In Europe, the joblessness of the young — long an issue throughout the continent — has become desperate: Spain, for example, now has a youth unemployment rate of 56 percent, 17 percentage points higher than its rate four years ago, with no relief in sight.
And yet Greece — the country worst hit by the recession in Europe — offers a new twist on this woeful tale of well-educated but luckless youth. With no good job prospects, some college grads there are turning to one of the world’s oldest professions: farming.
Foteini Kollias is one of them. Now twenty-five-years old, she graduated with a degree in physical education from the National University of Athens around the time Greece’s economy collapsed five years ago. Unable to get a full-time job in her field, she eventually turned to growing fruit in Nafplio, a seaport town to the southwest of Athens.
Once a week, Kollias makes the hour-and-a-half trip to Athens to sell her fruit in the city’s central market. Over four years of farming, the hard labor has taken a toll on Kollias’s health, leaving her with a meniscus tear in her right knee that gives her constant pain. “Imagine lifting a box loaded with forty-five kilos of cucumbers every day while weighing no more than fifty kilos [110 pounds] yourself,” she says.
It is a grim outcome for a young woman who had been on track to get a well-paid government job before the economic crisis hit. “Torturing my body for so little money and no future prospects really depresses me,” she says.
Of course, youth unemployment is not just a problem for people in rich countries. The global recession has damaged the prospects of young workers throughout the world, and even as economies have recovered, the jobs have not come back. The problem is much worse for those without college educations.
Yet facts like these provide little consolation to young, educated workers like Kollias, whose careers have been permanently scarred by the country’s deep recession, which began in 2008 and has yet to end. Last year, the economy shrank by 6.4 percent. The nation’s unemployment rate currently stands at 27.6 percent, more than twice the average rate in the Eurozone and more than three times what it was when the crisis struck in October 2008. Other countries in Europe have also been beset by severe economic problems in recent years, but Greece has been hit the hardest, becoming the focus of international efforts to stop the spread of its economic ailments throughout the continent’s interconnected market.
There are many reasons given for the collapse of Greece’s economy and the massive unemployment it unleashed. One school of thought argues that huge budget deficits and expensive government benefits — in Greece, excessively generous worker pay and pensions — were at the heart of a crisis accelerated by the global recession. Other economists point to evidence that the economic collapse had more to do with the destabilizing rush of foreign dollars into those rapidly growing economies. Regardless of why it happened, the damage is clear: In 2004, Greece’s national debt was 99 percent of its GDP. Last year, it was 157 percent.
In Greece itself, much attention has been focused on political mismanagement. According to one popular account, one-party governments led alternately by the center-right New Democracy party and the center-left PASOK spread a pandemic of corruption and incompetence within a nepotism-plagued public sector, which had been growing unsustainably up until the crisis. Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs helped the government to fudge statistics and conceal its rising debt levels from European regulators. Meanwhile, the allure of fast money had eroded ethical standards in the country to the point that tax evasion became rampant.
Amid the country’s recent decline, it is difficult to remember the Greece of the fifties, sixties, and seventies — a period called the “Greek economic miracle” — when the country’s economy was roaring. Occupied during World War II and devastated by the civil war that followed, Greece began its rebuilding in the fifties with an ambitious campaign to “urbanize” its rural communities. En masse, Greeks living in the countryside moved to the expanding concrete landscape of the cities, rapidly expanding the workforces and consumer markets to be found there. The Greek “miracle” ended in the seventies, but healthy economic growth continued over the next few decades — until 2008.
Vassilis Psonis sells vegetables that he and his sister grow on their family’s farm. After he graduated from a cosmetology school, Vassilis couldn’t find work and didn’t have the funds to start his own business. Stav Dimitrοpoulos
Now the same process seems to be happening in the other direction, as young urbanites dash back to the fields. According to a survey conducted for the country’s Ministry of Rural Development in the populous counties of Attica and Thessaloniki, 68 percent of respondents — representing over one million Greeks, in a country of just ten million — are considering leaving the city. Two-thirds of them are college graduates, and a majority of them under the age of forty. Nineteen percent of those surveyed said they have already initiated their moves.
The Greek press likes to call the country’s legions of unemployed young workers its “Lost Generation” — a term also used in the US and UK, among other countries, to identify their own struggling youth. It may be hard to compare their experience to that of the iconic Lost Generation of young men and women traumatized by the bloodbath of World War I. That said, these young Greeks have been traumatized by a cataclysm of an economic kind: a massive contraction of the nation’s economy on the order of 20 percent over five years. Their job prospects remain bleak even as the global economy has recovered: youth unemployment — for workers aged twenty-four and under — now stands at 64.9 percent, triple the rate five years ago. (Among those aged twenty-five to thirty-four, the rate is 38 percent, but for those thirty-five to forty-four, it is much smaller — 25 percent — proving that unemployment is wasted on the young.)
Greece, once one of Europe’s rising stars, now looks to be headed in the same direction as Japan during its “Lost Decade” of the nineties — into an age of diminished expectations, with swelling ranks of unemployed youth, and no simple way out of its economic malaise.
In the elegant coastal city of Kalamata, sister and brother Demetra and Vassilis Psonis tend to a stall in the farmers’ market, where their many wares are on display: chestnuts, peaches, tangerines, cherries, onions, cabbages, corn, and a variety of greens. When the recession struck five years ago, Demetra was just beginning her studies at the Technological Institute of Crete, where she majored in accounting. Up until the country’s crisis, Demetra had been confident that she would land a job in a field that — back then — was highly paid and secure. “Trying to find decent employment in the recession turned out to be a wild goose chase,” says Demetra, twenty-three. “I soon ended up working in a cafeteria.”
At the time, Demetra considered moving to a wealthier country in northern Europe to seek out better employment opportunities. But she had no idea about what city to move to, much less how to transplant herself there — even within the borderless European Union, labor is not as mobile as capital. “Going abroad? Where and with whom?” she asks. “I didn’t have to dwell a lot on the decision.” So Demetra ended up returning to her family’s farm in Kalamata. She knew the work well; she had been growing vegetables there ever since she was ten years old.
Her brother soon joined her. Vassilis, twenty-five, had trained to be a hairdresser. But when he graduated from school, he couldn’t find a job, and he lacked the capital to open his own business. Even if he did have a salon, he says, it was obvious then that few people would be paying good money for haircuts in that economic climate.
Like his sister, Vassilis worked the fields of his family’s farm as a child. “I always felt I had an alternative in case things didn’t go as planned,” he says. “I like it. I like everything that involves my hands. I tell myself I hold the hoe instead of the brush.”
Oddly enough, when the siblings decided to return to Kalamata, the people most opposed were their parents. Farmers for life, they and their generation had suffered through the misery of hard manual labor. They had cheered Greek’s meteoric ascent to economic power. They had dreamed of raising future academics, lawyers, and scientists who would lodge their families — and the children and grandchildren to come — within the well-paid professional classes.
“They sacrificed their lives to offer us a good education,” Vassilis says. But when the economy fell apart, those newly minted educations became worthless. And Vassilis, Demetra, and many of their peers headed for the fields — the familiar trend of urbanization played in reverse.
Siblings Demetra and Vassilis Psonis inspect the onions they are selling at the farmers’ market in Kalamata. Stav Dimitrοpoulos
The ancient Greek playwrights, who developed the concept of irony, would find much to write about concerning modern Greece’s travails. Older generations of farmers who once exhorted their children to seek out more and more education now find themselves advising the same kids — off the record — to take up farming again to “fill their stomachs.”
And yet Tassos Papaphilis, a thirty-four-year-old farmer, is reluctant to advise anyone, however desperate, to follow his path. Tassos grows crops in Corinth, an hour’s drive west of Athens. He is somewhat of a celebrity in the Athenian market where he sells his fruit, a long-haired jokester who teases and compliments passersby as he implores them — sometimes aggressively — to smell the sweet fragrance of his oranges.
A trade-school graduate, Tassos used to work as an estate agent for a large Corinthian firm, but he lost his job five years ago when the recession annihilated the country’s real-estate markets overnight. Unwilling to leave his birthplace, he decided to take up his father’s profession of farming. These days, he grows oranges, tangerines, and zucchini, and rears hens to sell their eggs.
His father died around the same time that Tassos lost his job. Farming became a way of coping — more than just financially. When plowing the soil, Tassos says, he feels an intimate connection to his dead father.
But his decision to go into farming has not yet paid off with a stable income, in spite of how hard Tassos works his fields. Taking over the family farm was “the biggest self-entrapment of my life,” he insists. Early on, Tassos received a European Union farm loan of 35,000 euros to enhance his business. But the country’s consumers cut back on their spending much more than expected, and with the markets so sluggish, his plans to expand his farming business came to naught. He has yet to repay the loan, and with his payments on it now exceeding his profits, he is doubtful that his crops will ever bring in enough money to do so.
In fact, Tassos is still dependent on his grandmother’s pension to make ends meet. In this regard, he is like a growing number of young Greeks, who, unable to keep up with their monthly rent and bills, have retreated to the family nest, living off the incomes of more secure parents and grandparents.
Now well into his thirties, Tassos knows he cannot start a family when he can barely feed himself. And there is no telling if and when the troika of European and international lenders who now prop up Greece’s economy with loans will decide to pull back, leaving Greece to implode. “The worst is yet to come,” Tassos warns.
Even though his farm is doing poorly, even though he has lost his business career, Tassos the farmer keeps greeting his customers in the market with a smile and a joke. “People are grumpy and sober nowadays,” he says. “Making others laugh is an antidote to depression that comes free of charge.”
The economist John Kenneth Galbraith once observed that unemployment in the days before industrialization was unheard of: “In traditional agriculture it did not exist; there was always work to do on the farms and in the supporting rural services.” During the Depression, he added, “farm employment or farm existence of a sort was the resort of some millions of urban workers in the United States.”
The Great Depression may offer this and other practical lessons for those struggling through the Great Recession. And yet it is also true that farming has become a less reliable last resort for families, with less bread to go around to their many breadwinners.
The rise of huge corporations has transformed the practice of agriculture and drastically lowered prices — and profits. It has become abundantly clear to Kollias, the farmer from Nafplio, how much things have changed. Her parents are both well educated: her mother studied medicine and her father is a mechanical engineer. In their thirties, they chose to become farmers because they valued their freedom, Kollias says. A family farm, back then, could actually support a family. “They worked hard, but their profit was in proportion to their labor hours,” she says. “If you had been eager to devote your body and soul to the land, you could have made good money in the past.”
Not anymore. Kollias puts it bluntly: “My brother, father, mother, and four workers live in the same house and struggle to scrape together a living,” There are no more “happy farmers,” she says — nothing like the yeomen farmers of Romantic poetry and Thomas Jefferson’s writings, tilling the soil and communing with nature — just jaded, overeducated young workers like her, anxious about their unsold merchandise and demoralized about their futures.
In between her trips to the farmers’ market in Athens, Kollias works occasionally as a lifeguard and gym instructor. The jobs pay little, but they help her retain the skills she learned studying physical education in college. When she was a student, she planned to take the civil-service exams and get a government job in her field. But when the crisis hit, the exams were called off. They have yet to be unfrozen. With no one willing to hire her, Kollias continues to grow her fruit.
With the years they spent in college amounting to nothing, and their work in the fields offering diminishing returns, the talents of Greece’s younger generation are being squandered. Who is to blame for the country’s modern tragedy? Kollias is unsure. She believes everybody shares some of the fault, even if she singles out Greece’s politicians for special scorn. “Still,” she adds, “we eat what we sow.”
Stav Dimitrοpoulos would like to thank Eleftheria for the newspaper’s help in finding interviewees and photographs for this story.
Stav Dimitrοpoulos Stav Dimitropoulos is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in major US, UK, Australian, and Canadian outlets. A native of Greece, she received the Athens Medal of Honor at the age of seventeen and went on to receive a master's degree. She experimented with journalism along the way, and has been writing ever since.
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I wrote an essay that appeared in the Atlantic yesterday. Based on the research for my book on unemployment, the piece talks about the debate over Denmark in last week’s Democratic presidential debate—and how the real debate should be over Canada:
