Tough Choices For Greece's Youth In Economic Crisis

by SYLVIA POGGIOLI

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/04/141014692/tough-choices-for-greeces-youth-in-economic-crisis

EnlargeAFP/AFP/Getty Images

In June, youth demonstrators in Greece protested against the country's new austerity package. The package was passed as a condition set by the European Union and IMF for release of a bailout to help Greece's ailing economy.

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October 4, 2011

The financial crisis gripping Greece is having a major impact on the country's young people. A two-tier labor market that favors the older generation and draconian austerity measures have triggered a record high jobless rate among those under 35.

And now, the economic upheaval is undermining the traditional family structure and pushing the young to leave their homeland for better prospects.

On a recent Saturday night in a pub in trendy Monastiraki, a group of 20-somethings held a going-away party for a young doctor who has found a job abroad. His friends don't feel so lucky.

"The general feeling is that the future does not depend on us," says Joanna Zahari-oudaki, a 31-year-old who gives private English lessons. She says she feels stuck and just tries to survive. "I try to imagine myself one month from now; I don't know what the answer is because every month, every day, we hear different things."

Zahari-oudaki says nothing changes and it doesn't feel like Greece is a democracy anymore.

Youth unemployment in Greece is running at 40 percent, one of the highest rates in Europe, and rising, as the economy rapidly shrinks. While the government is laying off middle-aged workers in the inflated civil service, the country of 11 million people last year lost 200,000 jobs in the private sector — where many young Greeks seek opportunities.

It wasn't easy even before the crisis hit, when the young used to be called the "700 generation." That label stood for a monthly salary of 700 euros, which is less than $1,000. Now, they're lucky if they make 500 euros, and they are rapidly disappearing from the labor market.

Seeking Opportunity Outside Greece

Unemployment offices in Greece are crowded, mostly with young people. George Koklas, 28, just got laid off from his job as a driver and bodyguard at the Finance Ministry. Previously, he worked with his father as a house painter — a skill he believes is useful anywhere.

EnlargeSylvia Poggioli/NPR

Stella Kasdagli, 30, and her husband Alexandros Karamalikis, 35, are trying to make ends meet. Karamalikis lost his job and and is now a stay-at-home father, raising their 13-month-old daughter

Koklas has already put the word out on the international Greek grapevine and hopes to go to the U.S. or Australia.

"The only thing left for us is to quit the country and to immigrate to another country," Koklas says. "I will feel very bad for my relatives, for my family, [but] not for my country. My country now is a big disgrace."

Greece's large and growing pool of skilled as well as unskilled workers is attracting headhunters from abroad. The Australian Embassy in Athens is already organizing work fairs in search of doctors and dentists as well as plumbers and home care workers. Even Germany is putting out feelers for doctors and engineers.

But in a country where family ties are intense, the No. 1 topic anguishing the Greek household is: Should the kids stay at home or seek their fortunes abroad?

Despina Papadopoulou, who teaches social sciences at Athens University, says the economic crisis is having a radical impact on one of the traditional pillars of Greek society: overprotective parents who coddle their children, promote their education and yet keep them at home well into adulthood.

"Now, you have one or even both parents who have lost their jobs," Papadopoulou says. "This is undermining fundamental family relationships. They're exploding, not because of a change in peoples' outlook but because social and economic conditions inside the family have changed."

The best-educated generation in Greek history has had the rug pulled out from under its feet.

Lidia Manca comes from a middle-class family and studies accounting and finance at Athens University. Her father, an engineer, recently lost his job, and Manca says she feels at a loss.

"I never thought before of leaving Greece and going out to find a job," Manca says. "But I think I have no future here. All of us studied hard, we got into a good university in Athens and now it just means nothing."

But some young people still have a clear aim in sight, and that doesn't include leaving Greece.

Youth Fighting Back

Now that the government is slashing funds for education, students from mostly low-income families who got into college through high entrance exam scores and good scholarships are staging protests and occupying buildings.

Evangelia Angehlina is a medical student who wants to be a surgeon. Her father is a plumber and her mother is a cleaning woman; she has no intention of leaving Greece.

In the middle-class neighborhood of Elinorosson, 30-year-old Stella Kasdagli and her 35-year-old husband, Alexandros Karamalikis, are trying to make ends meet."I want to fight here with other people to change this situation and have a future in our country," Angehlina says.

Kasdagli, managing editor of a magazine, has had her wages cut and has to pay a slew of new taxes. Her husband lost his job as a record producer and is now a stay-at-home father, raising their 13-month-old daughter. He restores old pieces of furniture, which he tries to sell to friends.

The couple say they'll stay in Greece.

"But we will do that in a hostile environment, without good public schools, without good public universities, without good nurseries, without anything from the state," Karamalikis says. "We give the money without taking something back; they just reduce their help to society, not only to us, but to the poor people who really need it."

The economic crisis is not only upsetting the family structure. It is also putting the spotlight on Greece's two-tier labor market, which includes older, full-time employees who have up to now enjoyed lifelong job security, and a second-class group of workers — mostly poorly paid young people with short-term contracts and few or no benefits.

George Kirtsos, a journalist and publisher, calls it a form of modern slavery. And he's not alone in thinking that the crisis could lead to some kind of uprising, led by the young, in what he calls a civil war among generations.

"Those who control the system that are in [their] 50s or 60s sent a bill of their own failure to the younger generation," Kirtsos says.

The 51% Tragedy: A Majority of Young Greek Workers Are Now Unemployed

Derek Thompson is a senior editor at The Atlantic, 

MAR 8 2012, 10:23 AM ET 

For the first time on record, more young Greek workers are without a job than with one, Reutersreports. 

Official youth unemployment in Greece has crossed the 50 percent barrier and there's very little reason to think that this is the ceiling. The economy is still shrinking. The latest round of austerity, which will punish wages and lead to more firings, has yet to set in. And, as economic pain tends to inflict itself disproportionately on the young -- young unemployment in the US is similarly twice the national rate -- there's good reason to expect that austerity will bite Greece's young economy even more severely.
Here's the graph from Eurostat data, via FT Alphaville. It only goes back to the end of 2011, but it gives you a sense of the scale of the crisis:

Putting the picture into words: The youth unemployment rate in Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria is between 8 and 9 percent. The youth unemployment rate in Spain and Greece is between 49 and (as we learned today) 51 percent.


Remember two things: (1) Things will get worse for Greece's economy before they get better, and (2) Unemployment is a lagging indicator, which means that things will get worse for Greek unemployment even after the economy gets better, which is scheduled to happen after the economy gets worse.

Over half of Greek youth unemployed

By Harry Papachristou

ATHENS | Thu Mar 8, 2012 3:06pm EST

(Reuters) - Greek unemployment hit another record high in December and for the first time the number of young people without a job outnumbered those in work.

Statistics service ELSTAT said on Thursday that the overall jobless rate rose to 21 percent from 20.9 percent in November, twice the euro zonerate.

The average unemployment rate for 2011 jumped to 17.3 percent from 12.5 percent in the previous year, according to the figures, which are not adjusted for seasonal factors.

Youth were particularly hit. For the first time on record, more people between 15-24 years were without a job than with one. Unemployment in that age group rose to 51.1 percent, twice as high as three years ago.

Budget cuts imposed by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund as a condition for saving the debt-laden country from a chaotic default have caused a wave of corporate closures and bankruptcies.

Greece's economy is estimated to have shrunk by a about a fifth since 2008, when it plunged into its deepest and longest post-war recession. About 600,000 jobs, more than one in ten, have been destroyed in the process.

Things will get worse before they get better, according to analysts. "Despite some emergency government measures to boost employment in early 2012, it is hard to see how the upward unemployment trend can be stabilized in the first half of the year," said Nikos Magginas, an economist at National Bank of Greece.

A record 1,033,507 people were without work in December, 41 percent more than in the same month last year. The number in work dropped to a record low of 3,899,319, down 7.9 percent year-on-year.

Pressured by its international backers under the terms of a planned European Union/International Monetary Fund bailout, the country's second since 2010, Greece last month slashed its minimum monthly wage by about a fifth to about 580 euros ($760), gross, to encourage hirings.

German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, however, said on Wednesday this was still higher than other debt-laden countries such as Spain.

The average jobless rate in the 17 countries sharing the euro rose slightly in December to a seasonally adjusted 10.6 percent, from 10.5 percent in November. ($1 = 0.7622 euros)

(Additional reporting by Renee Maltezou. Editing by Jeremy Gaunt.)

One in two young Greeks are unemployed as jobs crisis spirals

By Louisa Peacock, Jobs editor,08 Mar 2012 ,The Telegraph

Greece's youth unemployment rate hit 51.1pc in December, official statistics from ELSTAT showed on Thursday.

In contrast, Germany's youth unemployment rate is just 7.8pc.

The worrying youth jobless figure in Greece has overtaken crisis-hit Spain, which has its own youth jobless rate of 49.9pc, according to the latest available figures.

Overall, the jobless rate in Greece hit 21pc, up from 20.9pc in November and twice the eurozone rate.

The youth unemployment rate is twice as high as three years ago, according to the figures, which are not adjusted for seasonal factors.

A wave of corporate closures and bankruptcies have been brought on through budget cuts imposed by the European Union and International Monetary Fund as a condition for saving the debt-laden country from a chaotic default.

Some 600,000 jobs have been lost since 2008, when Greece's economy plunged into its deepest and longest post-war recession.

Nikos Magginas, an economist at National Bank of Greece, said: "Despite some emergency government measures to boost employment in early 2012, it is hard to see how the upward unemployment trend can be stabilized in the first half of the year."

Ten worst youth unemployment rates across the EU

Country	Youth unemployment rate (January 2012*)
Greece	51.1pc (December)
Spain	49.9pc
Slovakia	36pc
Portugal	35.1pc
Lithuania	34.4pc (December)
Italy	31.1pc
Latvia	29.9pc (Q3 2011)
Ireland	29.6pc
Bulgaria	28.9pc
Poland	27.5pc
UK 22.2pc	(Q3 2011)

*All figures for January 2012 unless otherwise stated

A record 1.03m people were without work in December, 41pc more than in the same month last year. The number in work dropped to a record low of 3.9m, down 7.9pc year-on-year.

Last month Greece slashed its minimum monthly wage by about a fifth to about 580 euros (£486), gross, to encourage hirings.

German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, however, said on Wednesday this was still higher than other debt-laden countries such as Spain.

The average unemployment rate for 2011 jumped to 17.3pc from 12.5pc in the previous year, according to the figures.

The average jobless rate in the 17 countries sharing the euro rose slightly in December to a seasonally adjusted 10.6pc, from 10.5pc in November.

Greece and Spain are the two worst countries in the eurozone in terms of youth unemployment, each with half of people under 25 out of work.

Other eurozone areas suffering high youth unemployment include Portugal, Italy and Poland. The UK's youth jobless rate is 22.2pc.

Greece's Youth Brace For an Uncertain Future

By Joanna Kakissis / Athens Friday, July 01, 2011 ,TIMES

Protesters take part in a rally against austerity in front of the parliament at Syntagma square in Athens June 30, 2011.

Yiorgos Karahalis / Reuters

"It's not much of a future," says Georgia Nikolopoulou, who's 28 and has an advanced degree in marine biology. After a two-year search, she could only find work at a clothing shop that's about to go under; six months later, she still hasn't been paid. "We only see dead ends, even though we have studied hard to make lives better for ourselves. Many of my friends are leaving Greece. I think I should, too, but for the moment I am going to stay here and fight."
After a dramatic week in which Greek lawmakers passed tough and unpopular new austerity measures, the country must resume cost-cutting as it pulls itself out of its worst recession since the 1970s. It's going to be an especially tough slog for young Greeks like Nikolopolou, many of whom are already jobless or underemployed. According to the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), Greece's unemployment rate has doubled in the last three years to 16.2%. But it's more than 42% for Greeks between the ages of 18 and 24, and 22% for those between 25 and 34. (See photos of the protesters in Athens.)
Since late May, Nikolopoulou has joined the sit-in, anti-austerity protest at Syntagma, the square across the street from parliament. The so-called aganaktismenoi, or indignants, have modeled their movement after the indignandos in Spain, where youth unemployment is a whopping 44.3%. Though the demonstrators represents a cross-section of Greece, including pensioners and middle-aged workers, the young Greeks involved in it are among the most energized, says Ioannis Tsarmougelis, an economics professor at the University of the Aegean. "The older Greeks in this movement are fighting because they don't want to lose what they have worked for," he says. "But younger Greeks are fighting to have a future."
Most of the militants who challenged police during the demonstrations this week were Greeks in their teens and 20s. Mary Bossis, a security scholar and professor at the University of Piraeus, has said the economic crisis has also fueled a social crisis that feeds anti-authoritarian violence by young Greeks who are literally taking out their frustrations on a society they consider broken. "Older people attack tolls and let the cars go by freely without paying tolls. That's their idea of resistance, and that's not violent," she says. But some young people join social movements "against the government, against the decision of any European government, against everything," she says. "And sometimes this comes out violently." (See photos of clashes between protesters and police.)
Ilias Kikilias, head of Greece's employment agency, OAED, told the Greek daily Kathimerini that it would have been tough for young Greeks even without the financial crisis. He says the number of new university graduates has doubled in the last two decades, and that the labor market cannot absorb them.
Some studies say the unemployment rate is expected to keep rising until 2015, which means many young Greeks will be shut out of the job market for years. Prime Minister George Papandreou has publicly fretted about a "brain drain" of Greece's young intellectuals. There are concerns that more Greeks who leave to study abroad won't return, since the country's service-oriented economy relies on cheap labor, according to research by economic geographer Lois Lambrianidis, a professor at the University of Macedonia. On July 6, Lambrianidis will present his research at a debate in Athens titled "I'm Leaving: A Generation's Dilemma." Elias Demian, a 28-year-old freelance environmental policy consultant, suggests those fears are well-founded. "Even those of us who have jobs, and I count myself very lucky to have a job, are extremely worried," he says. "If I lose my job, I don't know if I would find another one in this market."
Demian supports economic reforms such as opening up closed professions like law and engineering, decreasing bureaucracy in starting businesses in Greece and downsizing and reinventing the public sector so those jobs go to those with the best qualifications, not the best political connections. He hoped the first set of austerity measures introduced last year would seed those changes. But after Greece teetered on the verge of default a year later, he wonders if the government is moving quickly enough to implement those reforms. (See how the U.S. can avoid its own Greek tragedy.)
"If we have no money as a country, we have no power to negotiate with the Europeans, with anyone," he says. "I believe Greeks would rally to support measures if the measures showed results. I know young Greeks would like to see their prospects change in this country. But we have to see results, not stagnation. This is not the future we're dreaming of."

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2081025,00.html#ixzz1oXLsfo7w

Facing the Crisis .Time to Get Angry, Europe

 

 

An Essay by Ulrich Beck,08/24/2011, Spiegell Online

The European common currency is in trouble, several EU countries are facing mountains of debt and solidarity within the bloc is declining. It is European youth, in particular, who have drawn the short stick. Closer cooperation is the only way forward.

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Germany's European policy is about to undergo a transformation as significant as Ostpolitik --the country's improvement of relations with the Soviet bloc -- was in the early 1970s. While that policy was characterized by the slogan "change through rapprochement," Berlin's new approach might be dubbed "more justice through more Europe."

In both cases, it is a question of overcoming a divide, between the East and the West in the 1970s and between north and south today. Politicians tirelessly insist that Europe is a community of fate. It has been that way since the establishment of the European Union. The EU is an idea that grew out of the physical and moral devastation following World War II. Ostpolitik was an idea devoted to defusing the Cold War and perforating the Iron Curtain.
Unlike earlier nations and empires that celebrated their origins in myths and heroic victories, the EU is a transnational governmental institution that emerged from the agony of defeat and consternation over the Holocaust. But now that war and peace is no longer the overriding issue, what does the European community of fate signify as a new generational experience? It is the existential threat posed by the financial and euro crisis that is making Europeans realize that they do not live in Germany or France, but in Europe. For the first time, Europe's young people are experiencing their own "European fate." Better educated than ever and possessing high expectations, they are confronting a decline in the labor markets triggered by the threat of national bankruptcies and the economic crisis. Today one in five Europeans under 25 is unemployed.
A New Age of Risky Confusion
In those places where they have set up their tent cities and raised their voices, they are demanding social justice. In Spain and Portugal, as well as in Tunisia, Egypt and Israel ( unlike Great Britain), they are voicing their demands in a way as nonviolent as it is powerful. Europe and its youth are united in their rage over politicians who are willing to spend unimaginable sums of money to rescue banks, even as they gamble away the futures of their countries' youth. If the hopes of Europe's young people fall victim to the euro crisis, what can the future hold for a Europe whose population is getting older and older?
News programs offer new visual material for the dawning of a new age of risky confusion -- the "world risk society" -- on an almost daily basis. The headlines have been interchangeable for some time: Insecurity Over the Future of the Global Economy, EU Bailout Fund in Jeopardy, Merkel Attends Crisis Meeting with Sarkozy, Rating Agency Announces Downgrade of US Debt. Does the global financial crisis signal the deterioration of the old center? Ironically, it is authoritarian China that is playing the moral apostle on the financial front, with its sharp criticism of both democratic America and the EU.
There is one thing the financial crisis has undoubtedly achieved: Everyone (experts and politicians included) has been catapulted into a world that no one understands anymore. As far as the political reactions are concerned, there are two extreme scenarios that can be juxtaposed. The first is a Hegelian scenario, in which, given the threats that global risk capitalism engenders, the "ruse of reason" is afforded an historic opportunity. This is the cosmopolitan imperative: cooperate or fail, succeed together or fail individually.
At the same time, the inability to control financial risks (along with climate change and migration movements) presents a Carl Schmitt scenario, a strategic power game, which opens the door to ethnic and nationalist policy.
Taking Europe for Granted
The community of fate is inescapable in both models, because, no matter what we do, global risk capitalism creates new existential divisions and bonds across national, ethnic, religious and political boundaries. How can Europe even prevail in this environment? Paradoxically, the success of the EU is also one of its biggest obstacles. People have come to take many of its achievements for granted, so much so that that perhaps they would only notice them if they ceased to exist. One only need imagine an EU in which passport controls are reintroduced at borders, there are no longer reliable food safety regulations everywhere, freedom of speech and of the press no longer exist under today's standards (which Hungary is already violating, thereby exposing itself to strict scrutiny), and Europeans traveling to Budapest, Copenhagen or Prague, or even Paris, Madrid and Rome, are forced to exchange money and keep track of exchange rates. The notion of Europe as our home has become second nature to us. Perhaps this explains why we are prepared to jeopardize its existence so carelessly.
We must recognize and acknowledge the reality that Germany has become a part of the European community of fate -- in exactly the way former German Chancellor Willy Brandt described during the first session of parliament following German reunification: "Let us hope that being German and being European are now one and the same, today and forever."
Does the Hegelian idea that reason ultimately prevails throughout history, despite many diversions, still apply? Or is Carl Schmitt's belief that hostility among nations must invariably prevail more fitting to conditions in the world today?
Unlike the community of fate between two rivals that exists between the United States and China, Europe's community of fate is based on shared laws, a shared currency and shared borders, but also on a "never again!" principle. Instead of invoking a noble past, the EU attempts to ensure that the past will never repeat itself. Instead of becoming a super-state or a mechanism that represents enlightened national interests in the best of cases, the EU has taken on a third form. Its most important role is to orchestrate. It facilitates the networking of commitments and entities that include sovereign states, as well as transnational organizations, municipal and regional governments and the organizations of civil society.
An Accumulation of Impositions
Within this framework, the bailout funds for southern European countries have engendered a logic of conflict between donor and debtor nations. The donor nations must implement domestic austerity programs and, for this reason, are exerting political pressure on the debtor nations at a level exceeding the pain threshold. In contrast, the debtor nations see themselves subject to an EU dictate that violates their national autonomy and dignity. Both stir up hatred of Europe, because everyone sees Europe as an accumulation of impositions.
And then there is the perceived external threat. Critics of Islam, which claim that Muslims are abusing the West's values of freedom, managed to connect xenophobia with enlightenment. Suddenly it was possible to be opposed to the encroachment of certain immigrants, all in the name of enlightenment. As a result, three destructive processes are overlapping and being reinforced in Europe: xenophobia, Islamophobia and anti-European sentiments.
Many envision the end of politics when they think about politics. How can anyone be so blind? In big and small ways, and at the national, European and especially the global level, Hegel, the believer in reason, and Schmitt, who sees enemies everywhere, are at odds.
When it comes to the eternal crisis called Europe, this conflict over the model of the future raises the following questions: To what extent does the revolution among outraged youth actually transcend national borders and promote solidarity? To what extent does the feeling of being left behind lead to a European generational experience and new European policy initiatives? How are workers, the unions and the center of European society behaving? Which of the major parties, in Germany, for example, has the courage to explain to citizens what Europe as a homeland is worth to them?
Merkel adheres to the Hegelian idea by preferring the detours of reason. To use the metaphor of dance: two steps backward, one step to the side, then a magical, lightning-quick about-face, softened by a tiny step forward -- in much the same way as the coalition government in Berlin is hopping, stumbling and tumbling its way forward, dancing to music that neither the Germans nor the other Europeans can hear or comprehend. While former Chancellor Helmut Kohl warned against a German Europe and sought a European Germany, Merkel advocates a German euro-nationalism, putting her faith in the ability of Berlin's regulatory and economic policy to heal Europe's wounds.
Time for More Hegel
But in light of the financial crisis, European policy today should play the same role as the Ostpolitik of the 1970s did in divided Germany: a unification policy without borders. Why was the enormously expensive reunification with East Germany self-evident, and why, on the other hand, is the economic integration of debtor nations like Greece and Portugal frowned upon? It isn't just a question of paying the piper. In fact, the real challenge is to rethink and reshape Europe's future and its position in the world.

The introduction of euro bonds would not be a betrayal of German interests. The road to a union characterized by solidarity, much like the recognition of the Oder-Neisse border between a unified Germany and Poland, is indeed in Germany's well-considered interest. It is an expression of European and German realpolitik. Why shouldn't Europe introduce a financial transaction tax, which would establish a financial scope for a social and environmental Europe, which in turn would promise workers security through Europe, and in doing so address the greatest concerns of young Europeans?
The concept of more justice through more Europe contains an appeal in terms of a transnational community of solidarity. "Be outraged, Europeans." Just as many demonized Brandt's talk of rapprochement with the communist bloc as treason, today's call for "more Europe!" is a blow in the face of national self-awareness.
Merkel's back-and-forth and forward-and-backward approach could also create an opportunity for a future project involving the Social Democrats and the Green Party. As soon as the SPD and the Greens have explained that a social Europe is more than an introverted tightwad, but rather -- using Hegel's argument -- an historic necessity, even the SPD will regain stature and win elections. This, of course, is predicated upon its having the courage to declare Europe to be its main project, just as Ostpolitik was more than 40 years ago.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Greece's healthcare system is on the brink of catastrophe

Patients who cannot afford treatment and hospitals without critical supplies are among victims of the financial meltdown

Peter Beaumont in Perama

guardian.co.uk, Friday 5 August 2011 22.00 BST

The accident and emergency ward at a hospital in Athens – hospitals here face regular shortages of materials and equipment. Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

Adonis Kostakos is unemployed and diabetic. Aged 50, he last worked regularly four years ago in the port of Piraeus. Back then he used Greece's public hospital system to have his blood sugar checked and get his medication.

These days, receiving no unemployment benefit, he cannot afford to pay for his drugs or the new €5 hospital fee introduced as part of Greece's austerity measures.
So today Kostakos has come to a free clinic in the shipbuilding town of Perama, where he lives, to pick up his medication. The drop-in surgery run by the global charity Médecins du Monde was originally set up to cater for illegal immigrants. But today, there are only native Greeks.
Posters on the wall show war and famine, but the solitary doctor, George Padakis, 30, is dealing with a different kind of catastrophe – victims of the financial meltdown, which has pushed Greece's health system to the brink.
"I have no insurance and I'm unemployed," says Kostakos. "I heard about this clinic from a friend. I was going to the public hospital, but nowadays I can't afford to do even that. I know lots of people in this town who are in the same situation as me, 10 of them personally."
Next in line is Nikos Famalis. He is 72 and has multiple health problems.
"I've been coming here since it opened," he says, when he emerges clutching a handful of boxes of medicine. "I used to have insurance when I was younger, but I don't have the right papers now. I'm trying to get papers for free treatment in the public hospital but it takes time."
The Greek system is a bureaucratic nightmare, with endless paperwork to fill in and hoops to jump through. Those without resources of any kind can qualify for free healthcare, but even then the state will only pay for some medicines.
And even those entitled to reduced or free medication often cannot find pharmacists to provide them and are instead asked to pay the cost up front and seek reimbursement. Others come into the clinic. A middle-aged man with swollen legs from heart disease needs diuretics; a younger man, who once worked in the nearby shipyards, comes in to be treated for high blood pressure.
"When I came here," says Padakis, "I didn't expect to be treating Greeks. I had no idea so many Greeks had these problems. I thought I would be working with illegal immigrants.
On a typical day the clinic sees around 20 people. "The problems are never simple. Sometimes people don't have the correct insurance or it takes time for the right papers to come through. Sometimes it is as simple as the fact that they don't have a few euros for the bus to go to the hospital for an appointment, so they come here.
"These people are often new poor [created by the financial crisis] and an additional problem is that the hospitals are now charging each time someone visits. The Greek heath system is just getting worse and worse," he adds sadly. "A health system that was not the best is becoming worse and worse."
"The people who can afford it can get immediate treatment. But what is happening in areas like this with high unemployment is that people with health issues are not getting checked up or, perhaps, like one patient – a 42-year-old man with diabetes – have not been taking medication when they should because they can't afford it, so what should be a manageable health problem turns into a crisis.
"He said to me: 'Look, I have four children and I only worked three days last month."'
If the clinic in Perama is an example of how bad things have got for those at the bottom of Greece's ruined economy, elsewhere doctors and patients have their own horror stories to tell in a corrupt health system where paying bribes to doctors is commonplace.
As a result of the crisis, doctors' wages in the public system have been cut in line with other government workers, while hospitals fear being merged and face regular shortages of materials.
Most damaging is how an already unequal health system has become more unequal still – a three-tier affair that discriminates systematically against those most vulnerable and least able to afford health care, marginalising them still further in society.
Even the private hospitals have not been immune to the crisis. In the Iasso maternity hospital Jenny and Pantedis Ioannidis, two young registrars, are celebrating the birth of their first child.
A bright, busy and modern place which handles 16,500 deliveries a year, the hospital has had to cut its fees by 35% in response to the crisis to ensure the flow of patients through its doors continues.
The man who performed the operation is sitting with them, Anastasios Pachydakis, 38, who trained for a while at London's Homerton hospital in Hackney. Pachydakis has performed two operations this year for free for some long-term patients whose business he hopes to keep in the future, because they did not have the money to pay him.
"Most colleagues working in private hospitals have had to cut their fees," says Pantedis Ioannidis.
Working in public hospitals – Jenny as a radiologist and Pantedis as an ophthalmologist – they have seen where the impact of the crisis has hit most acutely.
It is a crisis whose consequences will be inherited by their newborn son, not least the €35,000 of debt now owed by every new child born in Greece.
For the two doctors so far one of the biggest impacts has been on their income in a country where the salaries of public servants, including doctors, had traditionally been bumped up by bonuses at Christmas and for the Easter and summer holidays, amounting to an extra two months' earnings. Those "presents", as they are known, have been abolished as part of the Greek government's austerity programme.
"It is not just the bonuses," says Pantedis, "they have cut other allowances as well including an allowance for expensive medical text books."
Then there are the problems confronted by the hospitals. In one busy Athens accident and emergency department the ambulance drivers complain they are not always sure if they will be paid, while many hospitals have periodic shortages of equipment.
"I work in Athens's biggest hospital," says Jenny, "and there have been times this year when we've been missing a lot of important stuff. Because the hospital owed suppliers money, we had no stents. Then there were two weeks when we had none of the paper towels we use for wiping gel off patients. We were using toilet paper and kitchen towels. That was six months ago."
Pantedis's story is more shocking. A says a shortage in intraocular lenses for cataract operations earlier this year at hospitals in Athens meant a run on his own hospital, which was still well stocked, forcing his hospital to refuse new patients needing the procedure.
The Nikaia public hospital is very different to the modern Iasso. It is clean but old with gloomy corridors, the rooms bare and functional. Outside one of its buildings a dog suns itself where the ambulances drop off their patients.
Dr Olga Kosmopoulou, a specialist in infectious diseases including HIV, is wearing a badge on her coat. She explains it marks a six-year-old campaign to eradicate corruption by doctors and others in Greece's health system. It is a campaign, she explains ruefully, that was "completely unsuccessful".
"We have a private sector that has been highly profitable and we have had a public sector that has delivered good results," she says. "But the fact is it is not working now and it is not because doctors have had their wages cut.
"The problems are the shortages of materials that are essential in the public system and the fact that I don't feel I really work in public medicine any more because people have to pay at so many points," she adds.
"I chose to work in the public sector," she says with emphasis. "I had plenty of offers to work in the private sector, but I chose to work for people who could not pay."
Defiantly, she says she has only charged one of her patients the new €5 fee. The rest were simply too poor, so she refused to charge them. She is aware her stand against the new rule could get her into trouble, but says she is not scared"I have a patient who is HIV positive," says Kosmopoulou. "He was a journalist who worked on a little paper in Piraeus. He wasn't working and he owed his insurance company money and now he is uninsured. He has cancer. He can stay in the hospital and not pay. He can get his HIV medication and not pay. But I have a huge problem trying to get his chemotherapy paid for."
She returns to the same story I have heard from Jenny Ioannidis and other doctors – about endemic shortages.
Kosmopoulou reaches into her pocket and pulls out a needle required for affixing an IV line. "I always keep one in my pocket because the right size is so difficult to find."
She says bleakly: "We can't survive this crisis," and adds that she is afraid there is a plan to destroy Greece's public health system. In some respects, it is already in ruins.
• This article was amended on 8 August 2011. The original referred to a shortage in interocular lenses. This has been corrected.