Poverty in Greece

Mass unemployment is now permanent, with the official jobless rate at 21 percent. For the first time, more than 50 percent of youth are without a job. More than 500,000 people have no income whatsoever in what was, until a few years ago, a nation with rising living standards. So desperate is the situation that some 500,000 people have left the country.

With 1,000 people a day being made unemployed, along with a never-ending onslaught on wages and benefits, an ever widening layer of society is now known as the “new homeless.”

This month, Christos Papatheodorou, social politics professor at the Democritus University of Thrace, told the AFP news agency that homelessness “risks exploding.”

The official poverty figures cited by ELSTAT do not include the thousands of homeless people in Greece. Papatheodorou noted that the European Union statistics institute Eurostat and national agencies “base their figures on a typical household, that is, on those having a roof above their heads. Therefore, the increase of extreme poverty among homeless people does not appear in the statistics.”

The Financial Times commented this month: “As Greece’s crisis deepens, the social fabric is showing signs of unravelling, raising questions about how much more austerity the country can take. Job losses, along with pension cuts, have created a new class of urban poor.”http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/mar2012/gree-