“No” he replies, “but you know, it’s a ring saying that we might be going in that direction.”
Lambidona: A young man dealing with love and undeclared work
Chapter 4 of “The Million-Dollar Question” series.
Photos: A. Christofilopoulos / FOS PHOTOS
As the dust falls and settles; as money get harder to earn, how does it interfere with love and relationships? With dreams about the future? The Greek youth is called the lost generation; they are educated and unemployed. As the government tries to fight undeclared work, some young people see no alternative; it allows them to stay with the person they are in love with, and not with their parents.
Kevin has a girlfriend, she is the first one he is serious with. The first one where he hasn’t fooled around with other girls. He is 22 years old, he moves energetically but has lazy eyes, and he likes to talk about her.
A Monday night, as he is walking up to Lambidona, a community house in Athens, he is smiling. I ask him how he is, what’s going on?
He is opening his backpack, taking out a small red heart-shaped box.
“Me and my girlfriend have our one-year-anniversary today,” he says. Then he opens the box; a thin gold ring with small stones is placed in the middle of the heart.
Kevin has a girlfriend and he also has a job. The contract is for four hours, one day every week, but in reality he works four days a week, twelve hours a day. He is paid 35 euro for a day of work. He works as a chef at a restaurant.
“It’s a bit under average” he says, normally a chef would get 4–5 euro per hour, but Kevin only gets 2,9 euro, and most of it is ‘under the table’.
He presses his lips together, then he sighs, “what can I do” he seems to say with his eyes.
The labour market in Greece is characterized by a relatively high level of self-employment and a large share of small enterprises, which is seen as the catalyst for the undeclared economy.
Small and medium-sized enterprises with up to 250 employees dominate the Greek economy and represent more than 99% of all businesses. These enterprises employ 86 percent of the Greek labour force, compared with 67 percent of the total European Union workforce. Micro enterprises with 1–9 employees, take up a large share of these enterprises as they represent 96 percent of all enterprises in Greece, and employ 55 percent of the labour force. In the EU-28 this number is below 30 percent.
These numbers relate to the fact that Greece has the highest percentage of self-employed people in Europe: 32 percent, while the rate is only 14 percent across the EU-28 (Eurostat, 2014).
“This structural feature of the Greek economy certainly helps understand the prevalence of undeclared work,” a report by the International Labour Organisation concludes, linking the high autonomy in organisation with autonomous behavior in terms of following legislation.
Kevin, along with so many others, works in a micro enterprise which doesn’t exactly follow work and tax legislation to the letter.
Not only do the autonomous way enterprises work have a negative impact on the economy and social institutions, but it also “implies risks for the individual workers, including a lack of social security, protection of rights and possibilities for career advancement,” the report state.
“Lambidona helped me get back on track. Coming here meant learning and understanding the meaning of solidarity. I think it was really important.”
Before Kevin gives the red heart-shaped box with the ring to his girlfriend, they are going to go for dinner.
“When we are having dinner” he explains, “I will give her another present,” he says and pulls out another box from his bag. It is a necklace.
It’s not as elegant as the ring. It’s a bit chunky; made out of fake gold and with big imitation stones.
“I will give her this at the dinner. I’m not sure if she will like it…” he tells me, looking excited. He likes to trick people and he knows what he is doing: first making her disappointed with the first present, then hours later, when she expects it the least, he will give the red heart-shaped box.
Kevin is helping out in the community house, Lambidona; he is one of the few young ones. He is doing different kinds of work there; helping out in the soup kitchen on Saturdays, bringing the tables from inside out to the terrace, and then in reverse, but mostly he comes here to hang out; to play cards and make jokes with friends.
He has been a part of Lambidona since the beginning, in 2011. Back then he was just a bully hanging out in the park which surrounds the community building.
After a while, having kept an eye on the activities of Lambidona, he started slowly to talk to the others involved, coming once in a while to the Tuesday assemblies, eventually helping out in the soup kitchen.
“Lambidona helped me get back on track,” he says. “Coming here meant learning and understanding the meaning of solidarity. I think it was really important.”
This summer he got a diploma from a cooking school. He loves to cook and is often explaining to the soup-kitchen team how they should do this or that, including me.
In August 2015, the so-called European Stability Mechanism support programme for Greece was approved by the Greek authorities and the European Commission.
The Memorandum of Understanding included that the authorities will adopt an action plan to fight undeclared and under-declared work, both in order to strengthen “the competitiveness of legal companies and protect workers as well as raise tax and social security revenues”.
This goal has led to a collaboration between the International Labour Organisation and the Greek Government to support the transition from informal to formal economy, addressing the problem of undeclared work in Greece.
The kind of work Kevin is doing.
Undeclared work and under-declared work concerns both formal institutions, the ‘state morality’, which is manifested in law and regulations, and secondly informal institutions which could be called the ‘citizen morality’ concerning socially shared rules, usually unwritten.
Undeclared and under-declared work happens when there is a different praxis between these two; when Kevin and his workplace are not playing according to the formal rules.
The organisations behind the work on undeclared work seems to be aware that dealing with this issue is complex and difficult, “especially when a country faces a difficult socioeconomic situation marked by high unemployment, a poor business environment and the lack of fiscal space.” So it’s stated in a report on the matter, published summer 2016.
“In Greece, like many other European countries, undeclared work remains a significant feature of the economy, despite measures taken in recent years to address the issue, including imposing stricter sanctions, reducing non-wage costs and reducing bureaucratic obligations and the administrative burden,“ the report continues.
For Kevin there is no alternative. He needs the job, and the rule of the game is that you take the job, not asking that many questions. With a youth unemployment rate of 46,1 percent measured in September, almost every second youth under 25 years of age is standing in line for a job.
Kevin knows this, and he knows he has to take home a salary if he wants to stay in the apartment where he lives with his girlfriend.
In October 2016, 4,2 million persons under 25 were unemployed in the EU-28, which means the youth unemployment rate was on average 18.7 percent. The lowest rate was observed in Germany with 6.8 percent and the highest was recorded in Greece, followed by Spain and Italy. Although, Spain and Italy are not seeing nearly the same extent of undeclared work.
The youth in Greece are popularly known as the ‘lost generation’, named so by sociologists and scientists.
Kevin also belongs to this generation, or maybe the extended version of it: whatever we will start naming the generation after the so-called lost generation. The leftovers?
He has been thinking about moving abroad to the United States. His sister lives in Florida where she is working as a nurse, here she has a family, kids. He knows he will be better paid, “at least double”, he says.
The migration of young educated Greeks is popularly known as the Brain Drain. According to Greece’s Central Bank, 223,000 have emigrated since 2008. The number went up from 20,000 in 2008, to over 53,000 in 2013, and increased further in 2014 and 2015.
“But what about your girlfriend?” I ask Kevin. He gives an unclear answer, “we will have to see,” he says. “Maybe she can come with me. I don’t know,” he continues.
“Greece currently uses a relatively narrow approach and range of measures to tackle the undeclared economy,” it’s noted in the report on undeclared work. This means, among other things, that there is a focus on deterring engagement, which roughly stated means punishing undeclared work instead of making declared work beneficial. The report also sees a lack of information campaigns.
If undeclared work is to be transformed into declared work, macro problems have to be addressed, the IOL states. The fall in GDP per capita needs to be stopped, public sector corruption and in the parliament as well must be reduced, and expenses on labour market interventions to help vulnerable groups needs to be increased. The list goes on; it seems that everything is difficult when a country is facing austerity policies.
Nevertheless, statistics shows a small but steady decline in the size of the undeclared economy, although statistics in this field should be handled carefully. In 2008 the percentage of undeclared work was estimated to be 24.3 percent of the official GDP, in 2013 it was ‘only’ 23.6 percent.
The next time I see Kevin, he is playing cards on the terrace with his girlfriend and Dimitris. She is wearing the ring but not the necklace. The trick worked as intended.
When we talk about the future, he says: “I don’t think I’m asking for much. I want a simple life, with a job that pays fairly and gives me security. A wife. I’m not so sure about kids. I don’t know if I would give them the life I can offer them.”
Right before Christmas he tells me he is leaving for the UK in January. He doesn’t know exactly where, “four hours from London,” he says, “my family has arranged a place where I can work and a place where I can stay. First, I will go for three months, and then we will have to see,” he says. His girlfriend doesn’t want to go, she wants to stay close to her family in Athens.
I guess we won’t know what will happen with this love story. I guess nobody does, not even Kevin.
In the next chapter you will meet Maria, she is a former teacher now on pension. She is supporting her 35 year old son who moved to Norway on a job hunt…
This post is part of AthensLive’s The Million-Dollar Question series, looking at how people get by with nothing. If you liked this story, please click on the ♥ below to recommend it to your friends, and follow us to catch the next one. Thanks!
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