According to the Minister of Labour, the 13-hour day “gives workers one more option,” reminding us that this measure is not new, as it has been in effect since 2023. Indeed, that was when Adonis Georgiadis first opened the door to it — at the time declaring that “with 115% extra pay per day, there’ll be a rush to work on Sundays.”
In the same spirit recently, Notis Mitarachi argued in Parliament that the right to work as many hours as one wishes is an “expression of social mobility,” adding that this “has always been an ideological choice of New Democracy, which supports anyone who wants to get ahead in life.”
“A self-employed person is not limited in how many hours they can work,” he said. “Why should a salaried employee — a child of a lesser god — have their right to work restricted?”
The former minister claimed that a person born poor has the right to become rich by working more. (If this relationship between working hours and wealth truly existed, one might reasonably wonder — why stop at 13 hours? Why not 15 or even 20, so that all hardworking citizens could swim in money?)
In reality, everyone knows that social mobility depends on equal opportunities, not on exhausting labour. It relies on concrete policies that create fair starting points. For decades, the main engine of social mobility in Greece was public education, which gave children from poor families the chance to change their lives. That mechanism has now collapsed.
Public education has been degraded, with a massive quality gap between public and private schools — as confirmed by PISA assessments. Children in public schools are falling behind not because they lack ambition, but because they’ve been abandoned. And it remains to be seen whether the same fate awaits public universities once private ones are introduced.
The Minister considers the public backlash “excessive.” The same was said, she noted, about the six-day workweek — adding that only 0.1% of businesses actually implemented that regulation. If that’s true, however, why was the measure introduced at all? What need does it serve, if neither employers nor employees have made use of it?
The government constantly invokes “productivity.” Yet, as numerous studies — including a recent report by Greece’s Federation of Enterprises (SEV) — have found, low productivity stems from the institutional environment: poor corporate governance, slow justice, and high energy costs.
And it’s fair to say that if anyone is responsible for those issues, it is the government — not the workers.
And amid all this, no one explains how, in a Greece of low productivity, corporate profits remain sky-high while wages languish at the bottom of the European Union. Perhaps, maybe in the end, the 13-hour workday is not a “right of the worker,” but the legalization of overwork — disguised as a cure for a system that simply doesn’t work?
