Etudes par pays volume 2, PDF, 346 p., 1,4 Mo - Femise

11873_2002 Study D2: Poverty, Informal Sector, Health and Labour
economic wellbeing of disadvantaged people and of weakening the povertycrime-poverty
vicious circle in the years to come.
One characteristic of the Greek society and its mode of operation, which
needs particular consideration in the context of this report, is that many
problems are beautifully solved in paper by laws and regulations, but if one
looks at the real world, things are not working as they are supposed to. Law
requires, for instance, that all workers, irrespective of nationality etc, should
be treated equally, are socially insured and they and their employers pay
social security contributions. And yet, the reality is different for thousands
of Greeks and legalized immigrants alike, who may still work without social
security and at wages below the legal minimum, or long hours without
analogous pay. Thence, equality and regularization in paper may solve some
of the problems of workers in general, but do not necessarily help them
escape poverty or remove the causes of crime.
The ‘paper-versus-reality’ situation is vivid in Greece in the case of the
NHS. Its philosophy expressed practically in the law by the declaration that
all citizens have a free of charge access to the NHS is in its implementation,
for various reasons, far from being true. As a result, poor people who cannot
afford the private health care services may not have the appropriate medical
attention, with implications on their health condition. By the same token,
people are inadequately protected against various diseases by the ineffective
primary health care and the unsuccessful efforts of preventive medicine, in
respect to smoking, drinking, drugs, dietary habits, lack of exercise, which
are all important factors of sickliness. Recall the non-negligible proportion
of poor that are found with health problems. People found in that situation
have difficulties with the labour market, which in turn leads to more poverty
with feedbacks in a process of poverty-health-poverty vicious circle.
Another ‘’free of charge’’ public good supposed to be equally accessible to
all, according to the law, is education from kindergarten all the way up to
the university. In reality, however, students bear a considerable cost of their
education for extra-school private tutorials, which is an old tradition in
Greece, signalizing the inadequacies in all levels of public education. In
addition, students enrolling in higher education institutions incur additional
living expenses - especially when they have to study in a place other than
the place of their parents’ residence - or are deprived of their education by
lack of family finance or the non-affordable foregone income. This situation
is equivalent to an actual inequality in the access to education, raising the
risk of unemployment, with further implications on poverty, youth
delinquency and crime, already mentioned. As our earlier presentation has
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