REVOLT AND CRISIS IN GREECE
226
(GSEE-ADEDY) into building the necessary consensus desired by the government, it should be less surprising to see the relative social calm amidst Greece’s financial storm. In this perspective, 5 May 2010 might have been a missed opportunity. Will there by any more opportunities? Only the future can tell. In the meantime the third revised version of the memorandum is being prepared, where collective wage agreements and workers rights are thrown, almost without a blink of an eye, into the dustbin of history. The 2011 budget proposes further reductions to spending on education and health (in addition to the 2010 cuts) and an increase in heating oil tax rate, while there is a reduction of the tax rate for corporate profits from 24% to 20%. At the same time, the deregulation of the labour market would also now affect wages in the private sector, with expected cuts between 10–40% (depending on the different sectoral pay agreements that are being now subordinated to firm agreements). The latest figures show temporary work to have risen from 11 to 12.5% in the years between 2007–09 (Eurostat 2010) while the total unemployment mounts to 12.2% for August 2010 and is expected to reach 15% or so in year 2011. The revised estimates for the budget deficit provided by the Eurostat place it at 9.4% (higher than the target of 8.1%), while the public debt has soared to 144% for 2010. Such high debt is not sustainable, as the government would have to pay around 7.5% of its GDP each year just for interest on its debt. There are two ways the government follows in order to consolidate its debt and avoid default. The first is selling public assets and the second is a restructuring of its debt. The former means an unprecedented scale of privatisations and large sellout of public property under the banner of “utilisation of the public land”. Regarding the latter, since restructuring most likely would happen under the terms of the lenders,15 a deep and prolonged recession period for the Greek economy has just started, under the “economic dictatorship” of the government, the IMF, and the EU. The economic crisis creates a permanent condition of emergency, and the opportunity for the government to pass unpopular structural reforms and austerity measures that it could not have done otherwise. In that respect, if the crisis did not exist, it would be in the interests of the establishment to create it. The Greek Prime Minister said it very succinctly on 3 May 2010, one day after the signing of the memorandum with the troika, the “crisis is an opportunity.” It is not only an opportunity for curbing corruption and tax evasion (as they claim to be doing), but also an opportunity to deregulate the labour markets, cut labour costs, restructure the pension system, reduce the provision of welfare, and expand the