Civil Servants In Greece ‘Sit-In’ To Fight For Their Jobs

VPM | By Joanna Kakissis

Published July 17, 2013 at 8:00 AM EDT

Updated April 20, 2023

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In Greece, unemployment is around 27 percent. Until recently, government jobs have been protected. Now, the country must cut the public sector in order to keep receiving international bailout loans. The parliament is set to vote on the cuts today. NPR’s Joanna Kakissis reports from Athens that civil servants are staging a sit-in to fight for their jobs.

JOANNA KAKISSIS, BYLINE: The protest felt like a mini Woodstock, not the tense demonstrations at Syntagma, the square outside parliament, has become known for. A band played as hundreds of civil servants pitched their camps. One was school guard Vaso Kanapi(ph).

VASO KANAPI: (Greek spoken)

KAKISSIS: We’re not numbers that they can subtract just like that, she says. That’s why we came here. The European Union and the International Monetary Fund, which are lending Greece billions in bailout loans, want the country to cut a total of 150,000 public sector jobs, nearly 20 percent of the workforce. They say politicians gave many of these jobs to their own supporters regardless of qualifications. That’s one reason why the civil service is so inefficient, says Kyriakos Mitsotakis. He’s the Greek government minister in charge of the downsizing.

KYRIAKOS MITSOTAKIS: Had we addressed the structural problems of the public sector earlier, Greece would not have gone through such a deep recession.

KAKISSIS: Mitsotakis says most of the job cuts have already come through attrition, but there must be some layoffs.

MITSOTAKIS: There’s always concern for any person who is going to lose her job so this whole process needs to be done in a just and fair manner and through a process of proper assessment, and this is exactly what we are trying to do.

KAKISSIS: He says those civil servants who got their jobs through merit will likely keep them, and the protesters know that the general public may have little sympathy for their cause after so many private sector jobs have been lost. For NPR News, I’m Joanna Kakissis in Athens. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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Joanna Kakissis

Joanna Kakissis is an international correspondent based in Kyiv, Ukraine, where she leads NPR's bureau and coverage of a conflict that has upended millions of lives, affected global energy and food supplies and pitted NATO against Russia.

Kakissis began reporting in Ukraine shortly before Russia invaded in February. She covered the exodus of refugees to Poland and has returned to Ukraine several times to chronicle the war. She has focused on the human costs, profiling the displaced, the families of prisoners of war and a ninety-year-old "mermaid" who swims in a mine-filled sea. Kakissis highlighted the tragedy for both sides with a story about the body of a Russian soldier abandoned in a hamlet he helped destroy, and she shed light on the potential for nuclear disaster with a report on the shelling of Nikopol by Russians occupying a nearby power plant.

Kakissis began reporting regularly for NPR from her base in Athens, Greece, in 2011. Her work has largely focused on the forces straining European unity — migration, nationalism and the rise of illiberalism in Hungary. She led coverage of the eurozone debt crisis and the mass migration of Syrian refugees to Europe. She's reported extensively in central and eastern Europe and has also filled in at NPR bureaus in Berlin, Istanbul, Jerusalem, London and Paris. She's a contributor to This American Life and has written for The New York Times, TIME, The New Yorker online and The Financial Times Magazine, among others. In 2021, she taught a journalism seminar as a visiting professor at Princeton University.

Kakissis was born in Greece, grew up in North and South Dakota and spent her early years in journalism at The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina.

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