Flexibility Without Security and Deconstruction of Collective Bargaining: The New Paradigm of Labor Law in Greece

Abstract

Greece’s accession to the financial support mechanism of the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission in May 2010 led to severe austerity measures radically affecting the whole range of labor legislation. An intense legislative activity was manifest between 2010 and 2013, aiming at a labor cost reduction and a labor rights’ restriction. The purpose of this Article is to offer a critical overview of the most crucial reforms that have taken place in the Greek labor legislation after the Memoranda and to demonstrate how they affected the foundations, the sources, the principles and the functions of the Greek labor law. The Article attempts to demonstrate that the Greek example reveals the paradigm shift in labor law that gradually expands across the Europe, consisting into the replacement of the after war humanitarian labor law model with a neoliberal economic model of market supremacy over labor rights. The Article argues that this paradigm shift is in line with the new economic governance structure at European level laying on the neoliberal dogma of deregulation, liberalization, and removal of collective regulation constraints over employment relationship.