Financial Times
February 22, 2012
As the news came in on Tuesday that the European Union had agreed a second bail-out for Greece, I set out from the Athens seaside suburb of Vouliagmeni to continue my investigation into how people manage to do business when the world around them is collapsing.
For two days I had been speaking to managers who had paid off or dismissed their worst staff and imposed take-it-or-leave-it pay cuts of up to 30 per cent on the rest.
Economic crisis provides the starkest evidence of where power lies: with those who have the money. In companies, that is the managers. In rented properties, whether commercial or residential, it is often the tenants. An owner of shop premises told me that one tenant had demanded that she cut the rent by almost half. She complied. The alternative was to see the shop empty, as so many Athens stores already are.
Several owners of apartment blocks said that residents could not pay the communal fee to buy heating fuel. So, the landlords covered it themselves. Some apartment buildings went without heating, shivering through the coldest winter in memory.
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