Dimitris Parsanoglou
One of the most significant facets of the current crisis in Greece is linked to the readjustment of labour relations. Apart from austerity measures, all major legislative initiatives, imposed in the framework of bailout loans and rescue packages provided by the Troika (the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank), included major structural reforms. The main aim of the Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) was nothing less than reducing labour cost in order to attract foreign investments.
In this framework, critics of the programs, stemming either from trade unions or from political forces of the left and right, focus on two interrelated issues: deregulation and balkanization or chinafication. Both of these positions imply a lost paradise; a world of a regulated labour regime – defined explicitly or implicitly in Fordist terms. Such a regime entails stable working relations with all the elements of labour protection that the Fordist regime of accumulation made us believe existed for at least some decades within and beyond the Trente Glorieuses. On the other hand, balkanization, africanization or chinafication are usually lined up as synonyms of the country’s degradation to an allegedly lower status within the international pecking order. Apart from their strong racist connotations, the common denominator of these signifiers is their allusion to the labour regime that the creditors of the country want to impose upon Greek workers.
Within this swirling down into the abyss where labour rights – in general and in particular – become an obsolete dream, several Trojan horses can and have been found. Creditors and investors, who sometimes coincide, particularly in the case of German capital interested in specific activities such as energy, seem to attempt the consolidation of a bridled regime for the exploitation of any natural resource and technical infrastructure in the country. Along these lines, extended programs of privatisation, establishment of Special Economic Zones, which among others constitute no-man’s-lands for labour rights, and specific Foreign Direct Investments are the main tools for a complete invasion of foreign capital into a ravaged country and for a full exploitation of a devastated labour force.
Paradise Lost? Alas! We’ve Never Been There
One thing is the money. But the economy is not only money. Living labour is not only measurable in financial terms. Surplus value is not only a financially determined appropriation; it is also – and maybe mostly – an aggregate of social relations and arrangements among workers and employers specifically developed in a given context. Speaking of context, we have to be rigid with the structural deficiency in defining any context at any given time. To be more clear: not only have the Fordist regime of accumulation and the labour regimes that it implied been an exception in the short history of capitalism, let alone the long history of labour; moreover, even this short period of Fordist normativity cannot be understood as a mere ideal type, on the body of which, even in the most advanced industrialised economies, nicks and scratches might be as visible as the smooth parts.
Greece has not been an exception to the exceptionality that rules labour regimes around the globe, and more or less within advanced capitalist economies. What now is lamented as a deregulation of labour relations triggers at least two points of doubt. First of all, there seems to be an overwhelming amnesia for precarious forms of labour that existed before the crisis and even during the Fordist parenthesis. Secondly, there seems to be a misunderstanding with regard to the meaning of the word deregulation and the corollary significance attributed to regulation through labour legislation and the inspection of the state.
To begin with the former, not only since the 1980s have diverse forms of precarious work – informal, non-standard, a-typical, non-declared, flexible, alternative, irregular, free-lance concealing dependent work, etc. – appeared; more importantly, they have been the most dynamic form of labour, particularly in some sectors, such as services and agriculture, even if they have never been really accepted by any component of the tripartite corporatist system. Identified by scholars as an indisputably strong tendency in all capitalist economies, developed and developing, informalization has been feared by national stakeholders and international organisations, such as OECD and ILO. Already in the mid-1990s, non-standard employment had reached 37 per cent in the UK, 30 per cent in France, almost 40 percent in Italy, more than 40 percent in the Netherlands, and almost 50 per cent in Japan and in Australia.
As for the latter, deregulation can hardly describe the shifts that have occurred in labour regimes in the last years of the crisis. The main line of argument sustaining this type of thought, dominant in the left, is that since the 1980s the neoliberal revolution has been dismantling the role of the state and the state itself by relinquishing any control of the labour – and any other – market to the market itself. Nonetheless, what is actually happening in the Greek laboratory over the last four to five years, both at the level of legal production and the role of state, is in fact an overregulation of any aspect of labour antagonism. Labour issues, such as the amount of the minimum wage or the validity of collective agreements, previously regulated within social bargaining among social partners, are decided by the government. Even issues ‘self-regulated’ by the labour market have gone under the aegis of the state; and a state which is experiencing a state of exception!
Here we come to the third, but probably not the last, act of the tragedy. Apart from the Paradise, another loss is that of sovereignty, a common point of mourning among those who stand against the politics of austerity, nationalists but also radical leftists. Indicative for the latter are the analyses which follow the Agamben’s ‘state of exception’ paradigm, which insists on the transformations of sovereignty, always meaning the effective loss of sovereignty by the nation state, i.e. by the Greek nation state. A leitmotif in historical analyses and fears of the nationalist right and the communist left, constantly linked to ‘dependence model’ analyses of uneven development where Greece was always placed into the periphery, sovereignty oscillates viciously between a well-dowried bride and a lost daughter, always a radiant object of desire for powerful and greedy foreigners. Spookily, the slogan ‘Greece belongs to Greeks’ so often used by Golden Dawn was launched in the late 1970s by Andreas Papandreou who was at the time openly influenced by Samir Amin and the ‘core-periphery’ analysis.
Les enfants du Pirée
Piraeus, and more specifically the port of Piraeus, is one of the few places that clearly resemble a Purgatory of the crisis. Including the worlds described above, Piraeus is a hub where the old Paradise and the new Hell collide in a paradigmatic way. Whatever could be thought of as Fordism in terms of organisation, processes and relations can be exemplarily found in the Piraeus Port Authority SA (OLP). At the end of 2012, the OLP was employing 1206 workers, mostly dockers. Most of them are unionized along the lines of the Dockworkers’ Union – Port of Piraeus, founding member of the International Dockworkers Council (IDC). Even some years before the concession agreement between OLP, Piraeus Container Terminal (PCT) and Cosco Pacific, signed on 25 November 2008, governments and conservative media were insisting on the ‘outrageous privileges of OLP dockworkers’.
This unjustified Paradise was substituted at least in Piers II and III (still under construction). The PCT labour regime, however, could be described for the moment more as a ‘black hole’ than a clear-cut hell. Little evidence on working conditions and labour relations has become public, and even entrance in PCT’s facilities is difficult if not impossible. Recruitment processes, which are mainly monitored by the Diakinisis Port & SIA E.E., subsidiary of ELGEKA S.A., the largest Greek commercial company in the food sector, are kept as a sealed secret. As an employee and unionist in OLP describes: ‘we do not have any formal contact with the company, because the company is theoretically subcontractor of Cosco. With the people of Diakinisis who are in the recruitment team, whenever we have gone inside, in any case you confront them, you know who they are, you know names, but there is no discussion on this [recruitment process and labour issues]’. A similar silence exists at PCT:
In the beginning, they were talking; they had the head of Human Resources speak, who was trembling like a leaf every time, because we went with Alavanos, when he was running as a candidate for Head of the Region of Attica, and they gave us this little lady. And there were two guys from Diakinisis who were pretending to be indifferent passersby, but they were following us everywhere. We were in front of the whole recruitment team, and she was trembling like a leaf, she couldn’t look us in the eye. She was a 50-55 years old woman in this condition. Now, they have changed policy, they have stopped talking entirely. For example, they were not responding to IDC or after, they were giving some vague answers. Then the IDC addressed even the headquarters in Antwerp. They were not yet moved to Piraeus, but now the headquarters have moved to Piraeus.
Everyday working conditions remain a black hole, on which the only rays of light are provided by workers who decided to denounce the company after being fired; more precisely, they pressed charges against the subcontractor for whom they worked in the PCT pier, because they were fired when they formed a rudimentary union. The description of working conditions and working arrangements can go under the heading extreme flexibility: ‘you were receiving an SMS to be at work in 3 hours. Nobody knew in which shift he would work the next day. Me, for nine months, I never worked on the basis of a work schedule. There was no schedule at all’.
These are the two labour worlds that comprise the logistical world under construction in ‘one of Europe’s top five container-shipping hubs’. It is important to note that labour struggles have occurred and are still occurring only in Paradise; most of them are focusing in preserving the Paradise, in avoiding degradation to the status of the neighbouring Hell. Piraeus port, in its simplicity (one of the most clear FDIs so much persevered by Greek governments) and its complexity (there is undoubtedly a latent war among different actors who from their position and for their interest raise obstacles to the completion of the Piraeus Port-Thriassion Freight Centre project), can open avenues of research where labour regimes, labour struggles, sovereignty and, above all, crisis can be revisited. And they must be revisited, since up to now, explications provided are either deterministic or/and bound hand and foot by facilitating, yet repressive models.