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One evening shortly before I traveled to Pangaio, the Greek government spokesman at the time, a politician named Simos Kedikoglou, stood before a television camera in a red tie and announced the first large-scale public worker firings in a very long time. “At a time when the Greek people endure sacrifices, there is no time for delay or hesitation,” Kedikoglou said, his dark eyebrows seesawing in the unnatural and exaggerated manner of someone attempting to come off as deeply serious. The state broadcaster, known as ERT, was an overstaffed bastion of plush benefits and incredible waste that could no longer be tolerated; it was necessary to “finish with the deficits and get out of the crisis.” ERT had six accounting departments that did not communicate with one another, employed tens of technicians to do the work of two or three, and paid massive, unjustified overtime, added Kedikoglou by way of giving a few examples. The broadcaster represented the quintessence of waste, and the government had the “bold and radical” will to do something about it. It had decided to close ERT through a joint ministerial decision, and would replace it with a more streamlined, high-quality broadcaster. ERT’s transmission would be cut off that night, he said. ERT’s main television news channel covered the speech live; its news anchors and commentators, though vainly trying to keep a modicum of journalistic objectivity, looked like prisoners awaiting their executions. Soon, as newscasters reported that riot police were on the way to disable their hilltop transmitters, the broadcast went blank. Outside ERT’s headquarters in a northern outskirt of Athens, thousands of protesters, to whom the government’s action seemed dictatorial, gathered and, through their shrieks of protest, suggested that Greece’s military junta—which fell in 1974—was still governing.
Though the levels of waste and nepotism at ERT were probably comparable to those in other parts of the public sector, the government made the broadcaster out to be the most errant embodiment of those ills, in order to justify its closure. ERT was so bad, in other words, a new broadcaster had to be started from scratch. The closure also had the effect of immediately reducing Greece’s public workforce by 2,660 workers, thereby going a long way toward fulfilling the wishes of the Troika, which was demanding prompt layoffs—specifically, 4,000 of them by the year’s end. The government had to begin those layoffs somewhere, but shutting down the state broadcaster was a very heavy-handed, clumsy way of doing it. In the words of a statement signed by the head of every major European public broadcaster, the move was “undemocratic and unprofessional.” While the government assured the public it would quickly create a new broadcaster modeled on the BBC or those in Germany, few believed in its preparedness to do so. Indeed, several months after the closure, an interim public television station aired black-and-white films, cooking shows, and innocuous documentaries. The prime minister had shut down a deeply flawed but nevertheless significant public news source with no clear capacity to replace it. This left Greeks to get their news from the major private television stations, largely owned by oligarchs seeking to influence the public discussion in ways amenable to their interests.
The government was acting under pressure from its creditors to show it was willing to break the taboo of firing government workers. Indeed, International Monetary Fund experts later commended the closure as a sign the government had at last begun to undertake the public sector reforms they had long been demanding. Yet, it wasn’t clear the action would help the government’s financial situation. ERT’s budget, as is the case with other European broadcasters, came from a separate levy taken directly from Greeks’ electric bills. ERT employees were also eventually granted generous severance pay, canceling out any initial savings that would come from a more efficiently run replacement. The day after the closure, Prime Minister Samaras gave a speech at a business awards event and presented the move as part of the government’s drive to break the sclerotic, Soviet-like insularity of the public administration. An incredible bureaucracy had blocked every effort to improve productivity due to its “grid of petrified ideological obsessions that have died everywhere else and survive only in Greece,” he said. The Greek state’s “opacity and waste don’t exist anywhere in the world today, at least not in Europe.” For too long, Samaras added, Greeks had been living with a “sinful ERT.”
In response, incensed Greek public sector labor unions announced a general strike. This is what they have done with regularity for decades in order to protect and improve public worker pay and benefits, particularly in the 1980s, when there were nearly 4,500 strikes in Greece; that is more than a strike a day. Greece is by far the most strike-prone nation in the European Union, and after the bailout agreement was struck, strikes became so common that some entrepreneurial Greeks created a website named after the Greek word for strike, www.apergia.gr, which daily informed commuters about which public transportation services had been shut down. On the day of the general strike, I traveled to a large demonstration that was to take place outside ERT’s headquarters. Despite sporadic transportation service that day, the metro line closest to the ERT building was running smoothly in order to convey trainloads of protesters. On my train car, a middle-aged man handed out flyers taken from his red backpack. “Do you know this government supports pederasts?” he said as he handed them out. The flyers were copies of a health ministry document listing the various psychological disturbances, including sexual perversions, for which one could get a disability benefit. Diagnosed pedophiles were deemed between 20 and 30 percent disabled, according to the document. “Do you know why the government supports pederasts?” the man asked me after handing me a flyer. “Because they’re all pederasts.”
“This government is worse than the junta!” cried a woman from further down the train car.
“And us?” said the man with the flyers. “We know our future. They’ll throw us out onto the street.”
When the train reached the station nearest to ERT, the protesters spilled out onto a suburban boulevard lined with furniture and electronics stores. Outside the broadcaster’s headquarters were assembled a dizzying array of far-left parties and organizations, divided by internecine squabbles yet united in their opposition to the plutocratic government. They all gathered, amid the many banners depicting the hammer and sickle, to chant slogans of support for ERT’s ergazomenoi (“the workers”), a word that has sacred connotation for the Greek left. The workers, in the left’s dualist worldview, were always on the righteous side in the class struggle against the bosses. While Greece indeed had an oligarchical class of crony capitalists that inflicted a lot of harm on the country, the left seemed to possess a lover’s blindness when it came to the inadequacies of the ergazomenoi that constituted Greece’s public administration. The communist party–affiliated trade union was particularly visible in its efforts to protect public jobs, at one point hanging a massive hammer-and-sickle banner from the Acropolis that read: PEOPLES OF EUROPE RISE UP. Outside ERT, I tried to keep track of the number of leftist groups: 1) the Internationalist Workers’ Left, a revolutionary Marxist group; 2) the Committee for a Workers’ International—a Trotskyist group; 3) the Red Network at the Coalition of the Radical Left, one of the “fronts” within Syriza; 4) the Communist Organization of Greece, a revolutionary Marxist and Maoist party; 5) the All-Workers Militant Front, the trade union of the main communist party of Greece; 6) the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Greece, a Maoist splinter faction from the main communist party. There were many more, but I decided to stop counting and made my way to the gate of the ERT complex, where enterprising souvlaki makers had set up stands and were conducting a brisk business.
From the bland five-story ERT building, depressed employee faces peered out through rows of windows and exhaled cigarette smoke. These were the first unfortunates in the public sector to be laid off, and they made it clear they would not go down easily. The workers had occupied the building and refused to relinquish control of it to the Greek state. “We are still alive and we are open,” a well-coiffed news anchorwoman standing in front of the building y
elled into a microphone. I tried to imagine the workers of National Public Radio or the Public Broadcasting Service in the United States taking similar action. It was hard to conjure the image of Renée Montagne or Charlie Rose doing this kind of thing—though it was also hard to fathom the U.S. government sending riot police to shut them down.
On the lawn in front of the entrance sat an array of supportive unions. The Panhellenic Federation of Employees in Public Financial Services, the Association of Workers in Institutions for the Mentally Ill and Vulnerable Social Groups, the Greek Federation of Bank Employees Unions. Some had impossible acronyms, such as EDOEAP, which was the United Journalistic Organization for Supplementary Insurance Care. Next to a few olive trees sat members of the Association of Waiters, Cooks, and Other Employees of the Catering Industry. Next to them hung their banner: IN RESPONSE TO THE ATTACK OF THE BOSSES WE RESPOND WITH CLASS SOLIDARITY AND ORGANIZING. Satellite trucks nearby continued to broadcast ERT programs, which were being streamed online. Inside, a hastily organized security apparatus of ERT employees checked my press credentials and noted my name; a precaution, they said, to screen out government agents and police. I walked upstairs to the broadcaster’s cafeteria, which was full of commiserating employees. Behind the counter were servings of roasted half chickens and boiled potatoes, but people mainly seemed to stick to the coffee and cigarettes. As I watched the small lady briskly working the cash register, I asked her where the money was going, given that the broadcaster officially didn’t exist anymore. She glanced at me with a look of disdain. “What money?” she said. “We need to pay our salaries!”
I sat down at one of the tables and met a friendly, thirty-eight-year-old mezzo-soprano in the ERT choir named Maria Karagiannaki, whose blue knit sweater matched the hue of her generously applied eye shadow. She began to defend the choir, although I hadn’t asked any accusatory questions. “It’s not true that we only perform two or three times a year,” she said to me. “Yes, some productions were very expensive, but it’s the politicians who signed off on those.” She went on to tell me that her choir performed very well despite being short-staffed. “How do you perform a Verdi’s Requiem with just thirty-five people?” A performance of Beethoven had won them so much praise, she said, that some people suggested they go to Germany to teach the Germans how to sing it. As we talked, I found it hard to think of this mezzo-soprano as the embodiment of the public sector problem. Her take-home pay was 900 euros a month, she told me. To be sure, she said, ERT needed some big changes, and a lot of the things people said about the wasteful spending and the nepotistic hiring were true. “But the politicians made it this way,” she said.
She had a point about that. Greek politicians had certainly long cultivated ERT’s excesses, just as they had cultivated many of the other excesses they were being forced to rein in. Parliamentarians, after all, were charged with appointing ERT’s board of directors, who were then in positions to hire politicians’ friends and family, and also to influence the news programming so that it was favorable to the government. Government ministers would routinely call ERT to tell its journalists how to report stories. Some people recognized these problems long before ERT was closed, but met fierce political resistance when they tried to do something about it. In 2011, a then government minister, Elias Mossialos, proposed a plan to improve the quality and objectivity of ERT’s coverage by making its leadership independent of the government. In order to reduce the excessive costs, Mossialos also suggested cutting down on much of the television programming, which few people watched anyway. Everyone including the New Democracy party, led by Samaras, the one who later closed ERT for its unredeemable sins, rejected the idea. Simos Kedikoglou, the politician who later announced ERT’s closure on television, back then told an ERT reporter that Mossialos’s reform proposal was going “totally in the wrong direction.” It would result in economic damage, lost jobs, and the transfer of valuable public assets to private interests, he said. Also, he added, cutting ERT broadcasts in border regions would dangerously cede those frequencies to neighboring enemies like the Turks. It’s unlikely that Kedikoglou only learned of ERT’s problems two years later, when he announced the shutdown. After all, Kedikoglou, a journalist by trade, had worked at ERT earlier in his career.
In addition to its regular employees, ERT hired numerous “consultants” for its programs, but whether many of them did much consulting was questionable. I ran into what seemed an example of this practice while briefly subletting an Athens apartment from a musician couple. As far as I first knew, the couple made a living performing music, and while their endeavors were not very lucrative, they seemed to be well taken care of by a parent. The couple had apartments in Athens, at least one in Paris, and a house on an Aegean island. They had sublet their main Athens dwelling, they told me, because they were struggling to make money playing music, and were planning on moving to Paris to begin anew. This was not unusual. Many young Greeks were leaving the country on account of the near impossibility of finding a good job. After ERT’s closure, the musician couple seemed demoralized, and then canceled their Paris plans. At first, I didn’t understand what ERT had to do with Paris. One of them explained that they had been acting as consultants for an arts program on ERT. Now that the program no longer existed, they had lost their main source of income, and could no longer afford to move to Paris. The musicians had told me about an aunt of theirs I should definitely talk to for my reporting; she knew everybody in terms of politicians. I wondered if that’s how they got their consulting gigs, but I never had the courage to ask.
ERT employees widely acknowledged the nepotism and other problems, though no one admitted to benefiting from it. Rather, many reacted to their government’s maladroit move to fire them with a high degree of self-aggrandizement. UNEMPLOYMENT AND POVERTY AND NOW LOSS OF CULTURE, read a banner employees hung from the ERT building. THIS IS THE PRICE FOR €. Workers portrayed their occupation of the building as a defense of the “the voice of the Greek people.” For months, ERT journalists continued rogue news broadcasts largely dedicated to resisting their demise, as if it was the most important global issue of the time. The reports, to put it euphemistically, lacked objectivity, and were interspersed with public service announcements protesting the closure. On one news program, a reporter summarized an article in The Economist that said the handling of ERT had made Greeks more skeptical of their government’s ability to implement reforms. The reporter left out that the article also said: “Few Greeks watch ERT’s four television channels; its programs are dull and its new anchors are political stooges.” News programs also frequently aired panel discussions consisting of ERT employees. A balding ERT technician named Nikos called the government’s action part of a “crisis of values.” He would not let the government take away the “values passed on from our teachers and our parents,” the “values we are struggling for and keep as our North Star.” I had met another technician, also named Nikos, during my visits to ERT. He told me to be wary when people told me their baseline salaries, because in reality, many received union-negotiated perks. Technicians, he told me, received a 10 percent bonus for being technicians, a 10 percent bonus for being trade union members, and a 20 percent bonus for doing hazardous work. “It was a party that was going on,” he said. “Until the moment when it stopped.”
After my conversation with the mezzo-soprano, I found the news television studio and met Kostas Karikis, a short man with a graying buzz cut, a large nose, and small eyes that evaded direct contact with mine. He was forty-three, and his job was to come up with the headlines that streamed across the television screen during news broadcasts. We found an empty office to sit in, and he rolled a cigarette and used a soda bottle as an ashtray. The decision to close ERT, he said, was clearly political. “They want a channel that is more subordinate to the government. That’s my opinion.” He had not finished university, and he feared that if he lost this job, he’d never find another. He would not starve; he had an aunt who was a doctor and could help
him, he said. But still, the thought of losing the job made him extremely depressed.
“I’m not young,” he said. “I’m not very handsome. I’m not qualified. I don’t have a degree. The only thing I know how to do is to do my job well and to use words to make a living. I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know if I can live without all these things.” Karikis then uttered what I thought to be a pretty fair assessment of the larger political situation in Greece. “This society is a society that has been very dependent on state money,” he said, extinguishing his cigarette. “It’s a communistic capitalism which gives people a small slice of state money so they will shut the fuck up and continue to bear the stealing. Now they say it’s our fault because we received the state money.” He paused and snapped: “Bullshit!” Then he added in a calmer voice, “We are bearing the weight of the public deficit because of our very big salaries? That is a myth. That is not half true. It’s maybe one-quarter true.”
I returned to ERT a few days later and found a stage had been set up on the lawn outside. ERT musicians were giving concerts to draw crowds and keep the protests alive. I walked inside, went through security, and found Karikis in the television control room. It was a big news night. The leaders of Greece’s coalition government were meeting to discuss ERT. The two left-leaning coalition parties spoke out against the prime minister’s action, and a lot of people at ERT were predicting the government’s collapse, a result that could mean they would keep their jobs. In the control room, about a dozen laid-off employees sat in front of about a dozen screens. Karikis stood in front of one of them. His stubble had grown into a beard and he had bags under his eyes. He’d been sleeping on a couch in the ERT building in order to guard against a police raid, which was expected to come in the middle of any one of those nights. Beside Karikis, a young woman sat typing on an oversized keyboard. The control room was loud. Everyone spoke at the same time, and the two people in charge yelled over everyone else. “Write ‘No Agreement Between the Three Party Leaders!’ ” shouted one of the superiors. Karikis repeated the line to the young woman at the big keyboard, who then typed it, and then it appeared on the screen. Karikis yelled back to the superior, suggesting they write that the coalition’s survival remained a question mark. The superior shot him down, saying it was premature to speculate about such a collapse. “I said ‘question mark’!” Karikis yelled in his defense. The superior yelled back: “All-Night Thriller of Political Developments.” Karikis repeated it, the young woman typed it, and it appeared on the screen. One of the bosses, a small man who was the loudest of them all, called for “dramatic tone” to play over the background. He then demanded a split screen that mimicked the private broadcast channels he was monitoring from his terminal. The woman in charge of screen splitting protested. One side of the split screen would be an empty podium awaiting a politician, and that would be stupid, she said. “Split screen! When I say split screen, you split the screen,” the little man said. “We’re showing the thriller. It’s the anticipation. When I say split screen, you split the screen.” The underling obeyed, but commanded her boss to “relax” in return. “No, I’ll yell,” he said. “You just split the screen. Period.” At one point, the location where the politician was about to speak was misidentified in an on-screen headline. Karikis reacted as if a baby had been run over, bringing his hands to his temples and unleashing a banshee wail as the woman at the typewriter corrected it.
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