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bktheirregularAnother general strike scheduled for a couple of weeks from now. The gist is, they don't like that they're getting hit by austerity measures which the government put into place because the budget's badly out of balance and the country's in serious debt and looking at steep premiums if it wants to offer bonds.
This on the heels of a two-day taxi drivers' strike, in which they were objecting to new rules that they have to (a) give receipts to passengers, (b) keep a log of their fares, and (c) pay income tax proportional to their actual income, instead of a flat 1200-euro annual tax no matter how much they bring in.
Significant disruptions, naturally; for a country that relies a lot on tourism, those sorts of disruptions are Bad News. Especially given the hooligans who run at the edges of some of the protest marches and smash anything that looks breakable, or throw stuff at the riot cops, or what have you.
The law office stays open during general strikes, though; the fact that the trade unions are annoyed and the economy's in a crunch doesn't change the fact that there are still people out there who need help from other people. Fundamentally, that's the point of being a lawyer: your job, boiled down, is to help other people navigate legal systems that have evolved in sometimes crazy ways for decades, centuries, sometimes millenia, and often in completely contradictory directions. Some guy in California can't expect to know what the Greek law is on inheritance and disinheritance, for example.
It's the fundamental reasoning behind job specialization, I guess. Like accountants. Or construction workers. Instead of everyone being a generalist and being mediocre at everything, people work at what they're good at, and apply their effort to helping people who aren't so good at that particular specialty, so that those people can get on with what they're good at.
The "I got mine, f[censored] you" attitude scrapes against the grain. So does the "screw you if you don't give me what I want" attitude - and look at the disruption that the strikes cause. Shut down public transportation - buses, trains, taxis, which is shut down today? Empty the airport's control towers - what about everyone transferring through Athens, and people coming in and out of the country? Block the border checkpoints to protest reduced farm subsidies - choking off ground exports?
I could go on for hours, probably.
This on the heels of a two-day taxi drivers' strike, in which they were objecting to new rules that they have to (a) give receipts to passengers, (b) keep a log of their fares, and (c) pay income tax proportional to their actual income, instead of a flat 1200-euro annual tax no matter how much they bring in.
Significant disruptions, naturally; for a country that relies a lot on tourism, those sorts of disruptions are Bad News. Especially given the hooligans who run at the edges of some of the protest marches and smash anything that looks breakable, or throw stuff at the riot cops, or what have you.
The law office stays open during general strikes, though; the fact that the trade unions are annoyed and the economy's in a crunch doesn't change the fact that there are still people out there who need help from other people. Fundamentally, that's the point of being a lawyer: your job, boiled down, is to help other people navigate legal systems that have evolved in sometimes crazy ways for decades, centuries, sometimes millenia, and often in completely contradictory directions. Some guy in California can't expect to know what the Greek law is on inheritance and disinheritance, for example.
It's the fundamental reasoning behind job specialization, I guess. Like accountants. Or construction workers. Instead of everyone being a generalist and being mediocre at everything, people work at what they're good at, and apply their effort to helping people who aren't so good at that particular specialty, so that those people can get on with what they're good at.
The "I got mine, f[censored] you" attitude scrapes against the grain. So does the "screw you if you don't give me what I want" attitude - and look at the disruption that the strikes cause. Shut down public transportation - buses, trains, taxis, which is shut down today? Empty the airport's control towers - what about everyone transferring through Athens, and people coming in and out of the country? Block the border checkpoints to protest reduced farm subsidies - choking off ground exports?
I could go on for hours, probably.