Here’s another story for the “almost defies parody” column.
Listening to NPR yesterday, I almost choked when I heard the results of this Pew Research poll, which asked the citizens of several European nations to name the country they believed to be the most “hard-working.” Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland, and the Czech Republic were all unanimous: it was the Germans. Only the Greeks dissented. Greece was the hardest-working country, they said.
If you’ve read one of those wonderfully lurid exposés of Greek working life that have been churned out by western journalists over the last couple of years I’m sure you’ll have a hard time keeping your lunch down. Or at least your laughter. As Michael Lewis perhaps most famously chronicled in his epic 2011 fall-of-Europe best-seller, Boomerang, almost every sector of the Greek labour market is breathtakingly bloated, crooked, or purposefully inefficient in some way, and it’s the country’s elevation of pointless pseudo-work to a form of high art that has now almost single-handedly poisoned the future of the EU.
Having long since abandoned any pretence of producing anything the world wants, the lucky quarter of Greek workers who toil in some form of government employment (a figure that almost certainly underestimates the country’s largest industry) enjoy paycheques that eclipse their private sector compatriots by nearly three-to-one. Almost all are unionized, and few — until recent emergency austerity laws kicked in — could ever be fired. Routine bonuses include perks for arduous tasks such as showing up on time, and in exchange, labourers perpetuate a byzantine web of regulation over all aspects of society and commerce that rarely benefit the life of the average Greek, but do heavily disincentivize foreign investment in a country that badly needs it.
Even vital services such as education, transportation, and health care are run largely from a mindset that favours generous compensation before literally everything else, resulting in monstrous paradoxes like the best-paid teachers generating the dumbest students, the best-paid engineers driving the most ramshackle trains, and the best-paid doctors having to be bribed by patients for service. Even in the Greek private sector, rigged laws have made absurdly early retirements — sometimes as early as 45 — possible within even the most laid-back professions, and wide scale tax evasion and non-enforcement (Lewis noted the crime is considered roughly on par with the crime of not opening a door for a lady) guarantees that subsidizing the perks of the bureaucratic class isn’t actually that painful. Unless you consider bankrupting rates of national debt painful.
Of course, when talking about Greece it’s important not to get too carried away with stereotypes. As some were quick to observe in response to the Pew survey, Greeks actually work more hours per year than the Germans or Dutch, and their high rate of government employment isn’t actually that unusual for an industrialized democracy (the Government of Canada, for instance, is also the largest employer of the Canadian public). At the same time, however, stated hours of work don’t necessarily mean much in a corrupt culture; a large number of Greeks are self-employed or otherwise entrusted to document their own hours, and Greece’s comparatively low rate of labour force participation — itself another symptom of the country’s dysfunction — will naturally necessitate longer hours for those who have chosen to opt-in. It’s also clear that not all forms of government work are created equal; if one’s job is so cushy and brainless that it’s easy to surf the net, chat on the phone, or even work a second job while performing it, then why not put in some overtime?
Around the time of the new millennium, it was very fashionable to buy into the Francis Fukuyama theory of globalization, which more or less presumed that the vicious cultural cleavages of previous eras had been largely papered over by the great equalizer of western capitalism. It was an argument echoed by both right and left alike, the latter who mourned the ugly American hegemony of global consumerism, the former as they celebrated the McDonald’s theory of peace. Almost no one, however, seemed much interested in the possibility that local cultures — even in Europe, that supposedly most quickly homogenizing of places — would actually prove to be greatly stubborn things, and that our ability to govern the 21st century economy would rest significantly on our ability to understand and manage the structural consequences of these uniquely nationalistic quirks and character flaws. Who would have guessed back in 1999 that one of the dominant debates of 2012 would center around an armchair sociological analysis of why we should all try to think and act a little more more Nordic or German, and a little less Mediterranean or Latin?
In the end, there was one silver lining in the Pew survey: the Greeks happily volunteered themselves when asked to name their continent’s “most corrupt” nation. If the first step towards resolution is admitting you have a problem, then the country’s at least halfway there.
