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Greece’s
leading private sector union says international auditors monitoring Greece's
compliance with its EU-IMF rescue package would have failed their own
evaluation.
"Their
program has destroyed us, pushing the Greek economy into recession,"
Yiannis Panagopoulos, head of the GSEE, an umbrella union with some 700,000
members, said on Friday.
He
made the remarks in Athens after meeting with the EU-IMF mission.
Panagopoulos
called the auditors "charlatans," adding, “If (the auditors) were
civil servants and had to be evaluated, it is certain that they would have been
fired."
The
auditors are inspecting Greece's finances, and urging the government to fulfill
its promises to evaluate the civil service and cut 150,000 state jobs by 2015.
Athens
is obligated to make spending cuts of 11.6 billion euros ($14.1 billion) over
the next two years in order to keep getting loans.
The
money is supposed to be saved by making cuts in pensions, health support and
other benefits.
"We
told them that if the measures reported in the newspapers are carried out,
recession in 2013 will be over 5.5 percent and unemployment could approach 28
percent," Panagopoulos noted.
GSEE
has vowed to present a "dynamic" response against the cuts.
Greece
has been at the epicenter of the eurozone debt crisis and is experiencing its
fourth year of recession, while harsh austerity measures have left about half a
million people without jobs.
One
in every five Greek workers is currently unemployed, banks are in a shaky
position, and pensions and salaries have been slashed by up to 40 percent.
Greek
youths have also been badly affected, and more than half of them are
unemployed.
The
long-drawn-out eurozone debt crisis, which began in Greece in late 2009 and
reached Italy, Spain, and France last year, is viewed as a threat not only to
Europe but also many of the world’s more developed economies.
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