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Chamber of Commerce president Manthos Mavrommatis must feel like an alien right now – wherever he goes he will be stared at with piercing eyes, almost like a common criminal. And the reason is that he called for the government to stop all new hirings in the civil service and freeze pay rises to all government employees.
The trouble is that the 50,000 public sector workers will continue to get their raise, no matter how unproductive they are and how much of a financial burden they may be to the state budget.
Mavrommatis said that the Chamber, KEVE, wants to see the government introduce a three-year austerity plan in order to keep the public sector deficit at 3% of GDP and public debt below 60%.
With all due respect, Mr. Mavrommatis, we’ve heard all this before. Despite the wonderful suggestions you and other employer groups or economists make, these will never be implemented and the private sector taxpayers will continue to carry the burden of paying for the wage hikes of civil servants, semi-government workers and bank employees, simply because their trade unions seem to be more powerful than the traditional labour groups of PEO, SEK and DEOK, whose membership is dwindling.
It is pointless renegotiating collective labour agreements, many of which are up for renewal very soon, when the government, as the biggest employers, refuses to impose the same terms of pay freezes and cuts on the civil servants, for fear of losing valuable votes in any upcoming election. Even those on temporary contracts tend to slip through the system and eventually get hired, while due to pressure from the civil servants’ union, jobs are not farmed out to the private sector which is the part of the workforce that carries the burden of getting the economy out of the current crisis.
There is no way to measure the productivity of the public sector (or so they tell us) which is why pay increases are imposed automatically. Furthermore, civil servants continue to get preferential treatment as regards their state pension which is funded by the private sector taxpayer with unequal rates paid by the two types of workers. No wonder, then, that the Social Insurance Fund has been on the brink of bankruptcy all these years.
If the present administration (that claims to be pro-labour) believes that it can tackle the crisis by imposing higher taxes, while refusing to touch the perks enjoyed by the civil servants, then it is bound to drive the economy into the ground. And the sooner KEVE drives this message into the administration’s head, the better for all of us.
