3. Greece's unemployment rate is almost 11%.
What a bizarre situation.
What a bizarre situation.
The Greek economy is dominated by low-wage tourist-oriented businesses, a whopping 20-30% of employed people are directly involved in them.
And they have to compete against Turkey, Egypt, and other low-income countries. These businesses simply cannot pay high salaries, there's no profit margin for it. So people don't want to work in these miserable conditions, and business owners have problems attracting labor.
The money of working hours per week is unchanged.
They are really not.
I looked into this in 2019, when I was making a backup plan to get an investor visa in the EU. You can buy a hotel business in Greece for basically peanuts, but it is almost impossible to make _any_ profit without resorting to shady tactics.
That's also why large chains can move in so easily. They can spread a lot of expenses and risks across multiple properties.
It's not a healthy situation to be in.
Maybe it's only hotels that are low-margin, with Airbnb being a competitor, but otherwise everything is too expensive for any Greek to afford to go on vacation in our own country any more. The money must be going somewhere.
> with the appropriate kickbacks to the local politicians
Umbrella business owners are likely paying off the local government and/or organized crime to keep competitors off.
Shows profitability for tourism around 20% in New Zealand - although that's on the back of some pretty crappy service jobs.
Elsewhere in the report it implies that the government makes more than 20% (15% sales tax GST, plus other taxes).
I'm not a huge fan of tourism as a sector because it's so cyclical and paid service to tourists is often unpleasant. Although tourism is likely better than some other export earners... But tourism is a more significant earner for Greece: ouch.
> However, at least the pay is good on Mykonos, which cannot be said for some of the less well-known Greek holiday destinations.
> All of this is why hotel-owners in regions like the popular Chalkidiki peninsula in northern Greece are having trouble finding enough workers. As a result, some restaurants and hotels in Greece will open late this summer.
If there's a worker shortage, why will hotels open later? Sounds to me like an excuse to cover up a less-busy-than-expected opening season.
> From the construction industry to the tourism sector, Greek employers cannot find the staff they need.
If you have bad working conditions (overtime, weekends) and pay very low salary, who wants those jobs?
Greece is in EU, so the workers can just move to better paying places (Germany, France, Nordics).
Maybe they rather need to tackle their many times mentioned corruption problems, so the value created can be distributed also among the workers.
So that work becomes worthwhile again.
The real truth is that working conditions, salaries and culture suck, and yes, workers are emigrating to other EU countries like never before in history of the country/region.
Politicians are crying their eyes out how people don't want to work so they're "forced" to let immigration being rampant. All the while being corrupted like there is no tomorrow (and probably there isn't).
This is happening everywhere and there are slight differences depending if those are jobs in tourism or not.
In tourism terrible cafe owners are complaining that waiters cost too much (they don't), hotel owners are paying minimum level wages to immigrants (why paying full salary to a local?), local public transit company is complaining that that cannot find drivers (so: immigration). All of this is complete BS. The standard of living is going down the drain, the difference between a tourist and local's buying power is larger and larger, politicians are doing everything in their powers to enrich themselves fuck all, same with judiciary, and public health services works only on paper. We're completely screwed.
And related, this reminds me about 20 years ago I was constantly hearing and reading from the media how domestic IT is sorely missing workers of any kind. Which was bs, they then wanted almost minimum wage experienced workers, just like they still want now.
When I was there, they gave huge cash discounts for everything.