Greece's Odyssey is not Over

Today Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras travels to Ithaca to announce the end of nearly a decade of bailouts. The idea that Tsipras wants to convey by traveling to Odysseus' home is that Greece's Odyssey is over. But it isn't.

To understand why read Liz Alderman's story from the other day, "Greece’s Bailout Is Ending. The Pain Is Far From Over." Over a third of the country lives near poverty, twice the level of the United States, and greater than the 27.4% poverty rate for African Americans. During the peak of the bailout crisis people weren't paid for months on end. They went to work anyway.

The Greece of today that Alderman describes is a neoliberal wonderland:

[F]or the vast majority of workers, Greece’s labor market remains a rough-and-tumble landscape.

To make the economy more competitive, Greece’s creditors — the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Commission — set austerity terms that included suspending collective bargaining and easing conditions for firing. Salaries in the public and private sectors fell more than 20 percent. The monthly minimum wage was cut to €586 in 2012, the second-lowest in the eurozone, from €751.

Today, a growing share of jobs are minimum wage. At least half involve temporary or part-time contracts. While that helps lower unemployment figures, many private-sector employees now earn less-than-poverty wages, according to the O.E.C.D., as do nearly half of Greek households with two children. Others work even more precariously with no contract at all, as employers seek to evade paying overtime and social security charges.

It all sounds very American, which I think was the point of austerity -- to roll back the European welfare state, and the party of the radical left, Syriza, jogged it over the finish line.