Strikes in Greece

The Economist

University staff have been on strike for 13 weeks without an end in sight

Dec 7th 2013 | ATHENS |

WHAT a difference a crisis can make. The same Greek students who used to stage months-long sit-ins to press for a bigger say in running university affairs are now desperate to get back to studying. A strike by administrative staff has shut Athens University and the Athens polytechnic, the country’s best higher-education institutions, for 13 weeks. New undergraduates have been unable to register for courses, let alone attend classes. Striking administrators have locked lecture halls, libraries and laboratories and kept the keys. “We’ve effectively lost the first semester of this academic year…so dozens of my students won’t be able to take their degrees on time,” says a frustrated law professor.

The strike involves about half the 1,150 administrators and support staff at eight state universities, whose jobs have been cut under the government’s drive to reduce the public payroll. Instead of being dismissed immediately, they are to join a “mobility scheme” for 25,000 public-sector workers. If they cannot find other state jobs within eight months they will be sacked. It took the troika of international lenders—the European Commission, European Central Bank and IMF—a year to persuade the government to adopt the scheme. It still faces strong resistance.

The strikers complain that administrators were ordered to move without first being evaluated. The job cuts, they claim, reflect the same system of political patronage formerly used to make civil-service appointments. “I didn’t have a strong professor or the right political connections to save my position,” says Pantelis, a computer technician at the Athens polytechnic who was selected for the mobility scheme.

Despite deep cuts in their budgets, state universities still allow students to spend up to ten years getting their first degree. But attitudes are changing. Middle-class parents, squeezed by high taxes, can no longer afford to keep their children at university for a decade. With youth unemployment at a record 58%, increasing numbers of young Greeks want to get their first degree out of the way and go abroad to acquire professional qualifications.

Constantine Arvanitopoulos, the education minister, is under attack for allowing the walkout to continue for so long. Some professors think he should mobilise the university administrators, a tactic used in the past to end walkouts by transport workers. Talks with Theodore Pelegrinis, rector of Athens university, who backs the strike, broke down on November 29th. Colleagues took aim at Mr Pelegrinis, a professor of philosophy and amateur actor, after he flew to Paris to present a one-man show on December 1st, which he wrote and directed, instead of resuming negotiations. He faces a disciplinary hearing. Yet Mr Pelegrinis is backed by Syriza, the main left-wing opposition party led by Alexis Tsipras, a young firebrand. Members of its militant student arm provide protection for the administrators picketing buildings around the scattered university campus and intimidate professors trying to enter their offices.

Even if the administrators end the strike and move into the mobility scheme, universities are unlikely to go back to working normally. Yannis Zabetakis, a professor at Athens University, says Greek universities already have a low ratio of administrators to students, with one non-teaching staff member to 78 students, against one non-teaching staffer for 13 students in Britain. With fewer lab technicians, students will be unable to carry out experiments. Library opening hours will be shorter.

A few professors have coped by holding seminars and tutorials in borrowed premises. But they are growing discouraged as the strike grinds on. Students fret that they will miss deadlines for graduate-school applications. “How can Greece catch up?” sighs Loukas Tsoukalis, professor of European integration at Athens University. “It seems you can’t have change without first having a disaster.