Beyond the Debt Negotiations: Greece’s New Deal?

The negotiations over Greece’s public debt and the terms of its bailout agreement have understandably taken center stage. Behind all the twists and turns, the key consideration is that even if the public debt could be repaid through continuing with austerity policies — and there is little reason to believe it can — it would still be a mistake, for both moral and pragmatic reasons. But dealing with Greek debt and the impossible terms of the agreement signed by the previous government is just the first step in dealing with Greece’s needless humanitarian crisis.

As noted, our own Rania Antonopoulos, senior scholar and director of the Levy Institute’s Gender Equality and the Economy program, has joined the new Syriza government as Deputy Minister of Labor. Particularly germane to her new role in helping to combat unemployment, Antonopoulos has done extensive research on direct job creation policies for Greece, featuring estimates of the macroeconomic and employment payoffs and the fiscal impact, as well as work on setting up systems of monitoring and evaluation.

At the last Minsky conference in Athens, she spoke about the necessity for a targeted job guarantee or employer-of-last-resort proposal in the context of the perilous state of the Greek labor market, including discussion of the scale of the program, estimated macroeconomic outcomes, and potential financing:

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Antonopoulos was also recently interviewed by Deutsche Welle on the subject of this targeted direct job creation policy (the whole interview can be found here):

Have Greece’s existing job support programs been successful?

The problem with the existing programs is that they focus on reskilling. They offer a maximum of two months or 80 hours of pay support, with the intention of helping people get some initial work experience.

But the main problem in Greece is lack of aggregate demand and consequent lack of jobs, not lack of skills. In fact, large numbers of highly qualified professionals have been leaving the country. And 80 hours isn’t enough to learn a new professional skill anyway. Also, the agencies managing the retraining programs ate up 75 percent of the available budget. Only 25 percent went to the unemployed as wages.

What kind of jobs do you envision creating?

We’ll work with local communities and initiatives to identify socially useful jobs. A key aim is to match people’s existing skills with socially needed tasks. We also want to stimulate economic activities that move in the direction of the new government’s development priorities.

Those priorities include renewable energy and sustainable fisheries, cooperative structures for locally produced food, organic farming… Plenty of initiatives have sprung up, but they need some support. The unemployed people trying to make them happen would be very happy to have wage support until they become sustainable independent businesses.