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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Greek families left struggling after successive cuts

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Hélène Colliopoulou


In the living room of his small Athens flat, 40-year-old Dimitris Voutsinos scours the web for job ads — one of thousands struggling to cope as Greece’s economic crisis endures.


“The key issue is uncertainty,” says the former sound technician, who has been out of work for years and relies on his elderly mother’s pension to make ends meet.


“We’re on monthly job contracts. Once that’s over, you don’t know if you’ll find something else,” says Voutsinos, who lost his main job a year before the crisis struck in 2010 and has only managed to find occasional short-term work in a call centre. He lives across the hall from his mother, whose $843 monthly pension has now become invaluable.


Voutsinos’ Lithuanian wife, a graphic artist, says they should relocate to her country. But he is reluctant to leave his mother behind.


At over 22 per cent, Greece has the European Union’s highest rate of unemployment.


It also has a soaring emigration rate. Nearly 430,000 people aged 15 to 64 have left the country to seek work abroad since 2010, according to Bank of Greece figures. Overall, Greece has lost a quarter of its economic output in the last seven years.


With daily necessities now weighing heavily on the family budget, the psychological release of casual shopping is no longer an option for most, notes psychologist Yiannis Giastas.


“Before the crisis, people could fight against depression through purchases and entertainment. (For many) those means are no longer available,” Giastas says.


Despite soaring unemployment, successive governments have increased taxes and cut pensions in the last seven years to qualify for back-to-back bailouts from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.


In May, under pressure from its creditors, the government slashed pensions again and cut tax breaks for 2019 and 2020, even for income just above the poverty level.


On Friday, the government passed yet another law, this time to freeze pensions by an additional year to 2023. Dimos Koumbouris, head of the association of Greek private sector pensioners, spent 40 years in the steel industry. His annual pension takings fell from 33,000 euros before the crisis to 16,000 today.


“We had planned to live our lives with a certain amount of money... we worked for this money... and now we live with (essentially) handouts,” said the father of two. For Greeks raised in the years of prosperity immediately before and after the country adopted the euro in 2001, the situation appears bleak. — AFP


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