The average government job pays almost three times the average private-sector job. The national railroad has annual revenues of 100 million euros against an annual wage bill of 400 million, plus 300 million euros in other expenses. The average state railroad employee earns 65,000 euros a year. Twenty years ago a successful businessman turned minister of finance named Stefanos Manos pointed out that it would be cheaper to put all Greeces rail passengers into taxicabs: its still true. We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension, Manos put it to me. And yet there isnt a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay. The Greek public-school system is the site of breathtaking inefficiency: one of the lowest-ranked systems in Europe, it nonetheless employs four times as many teachers per pupil as the highest-ranked, Finlands. Greeks who send their children to public schools simply assume that they will need to hire private tutors to make sure they actually learn something. There are three government-owned defense companies: together they have billions of euros in debts, and mounting losses. The retirement age for Greek jobs classified as arduous is as early as 55 for men and 50 for women. As this is also the moment when the state begins to shovel out generous pensions, more than 600 Greek professions somehow managed to get themselves classified as arduous: hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on. The Greek public health-care system spends far more on supplies than the European averageand it is not uncommon, several Greeks tell me, to see nurses and doctors leaving the job with their arms filled with paper towels and diapers and whatever else they can plunder from the supply closets.
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When Papaconstantinou arrived here, last October, the Greek government had estimated its 2009 budget deficit at 3.7 percent. Two weeks later that number was revised upward to 12.5 percent and actually turned out to be nearly 14 percent. He was the man whose job it had been to figure out and explain to the world why. The second day on the job I had to call a meeting to look at the budget, he says. I gathered everyone from the general accounting office, and we started this, like, discovery process. Each day they discovered some incredible omission. A pension debt of a billion dollars every year somehow remained off the governments books, where everyone pretended it did not exist, even though the government paid it; the hole in the pension plan for the self-employed was not the 300 million they had assumed but 1.1 billion euros; and so on. At the end of each day I would say, O.K., guys, is this all? And they would say Yeah. The next morning there would be this little hand rising in the back of the room: Actually, Minister, theres this other 100-to-200-million-euro gap.
This went on for a week. Among other things turned up were a great number of off-the-books phony job-creation programs. The Ministry of Agriculture had created an off-the-books unit employing 270 people to digitize the photographs of Greek public lands, the finance minister tells me. The trouble was that none of the 270 people had any experience with digital photography. The actual professions of these people were, like, hairdressers.
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