ABSTRACT
Greece has been an EU member since 1981. Since then, a series of economic and institutional restructurings including several labour market reforms, have been enacted in the country. The majority of them were either directed or monitored by EU official authorities, which, in most cases, endorsed these restructurings and praised the prospects of the Greek economy (EC (2009), Clauwaert and Schömann (2012)). All of a sudden, in early 2009, it was realised that Greece should have never entered the Eurozone as its economy was suffering from ‘huge public spending and debts’, ‘widespread tax evasion’ and ‘counterproductive patterns’. The country’s labour markets were found to be a lot more ‘rigid’ than those of Northern EU member states, mainly due to a lower incidence of part-time labour and due to strict dismissal regulations (OECD (2012)). Based upon such a discourse, and the official requests of successive Greek governments for EU bailout packages in order to deal with the ‘spectre of default’, one of the most tragic periods in the country’s modern history began. The result was the imposition of a painful devalorisation 1 – which has been presented as largely inevitable – to subordinate classes and social groups so that the Greek economy could attempt to overcome overaccumulation and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Michael-Matsas (2010), Armingeon and Baccaro (2012), Karamessini (2012)).
