The Diary of the Unemployed began as an online experiment by journalist and author Christoforos Kasdaglis. A simple invitation for the unemployed to share their stories online resulted in a huge outpouring of untold personal accounts of life without work in crisis Greece. 155+1 of these have now been edited into a moving book, published last week by Kastaniotis.
” I remember like it was yesterday the first night I came home. We had put the kids to bed. The elder seven and the younger five then. Passing outside of their room I heard them whispering in the dark. “Dad was fired,” said the older. “What does it mean that he was fired?” asked the younger. “They kicked him out of his work.” “And now what are we going to do? How will we shop? What we will we eat?” the little one wondered, clearly worried. “Don’t worry, go to sleep…” They stopped talking…”
– Anemos
In Greece, 26.5 per cent of the labour force, or 1.3 million people, are currently unemployed, out of a total population of about 11 million. If they were a city it would be the second largest city in Greece. Were they all to march on parliament all at once they would thoroughly overwhelm the riot police through sheer force of numbers. Were they all to vote for one political party, that party would win any election in a landslide.
Yet while unemployment is at the forefront of Greek political discourse, the unemployed themselves are often almost completely invisible.
On panel shows and radio broadcasts the vast majority of those talking about unemployment are very gainfully employed. The ‘unemployed’ in these discussions often fade into a faceless mass defined only by their lack of paid work, a group unable to help themselves that is simply to be pitied and, when possible, assisted.
In part it is the unemployed themselves who are responsible for this ‘disappearing act’. As journalist and author Christoforos Kasdaglis explains: “Of course part of the responsibility for their ‘non-presence’ belongs in some respects with the unemployed themselves. And if not with them personally, with their introspection, their guilt, their shame and their resignation, which leads them to shut themselves in their homes and not attempt to speak, to protest, to complain, to shout. They often prefer to remain invisible, in order not to provoke pity.”
It was partly this observation – that in Greece we so often talk about the unemployed but never to them – that led Kasdaglis to set up the website Diary of the Unemployed (Imerologio Anergou), an internet platform that invites the unemployed to share their stories (created and hosted by ThePressProject). As Kasdaglis writes, “The unemployed themselves write about their experiences, their torments, they outline their demands to a society that must urgently reverse its priorities. First the unemployed and then the middle-class. First the unemployed and then the minimum wage. First the unemployed and then the property tax. First the unemployed and then pensions and rebates.”
That the Diary of the Unemployed met a need that was desperately unfulfilled was demonstrated almost immediately. One the first day the site went live in April 2013, fifteen people uploaded their stories. To date over 3,000 first-hand accounts have been added, some named, many anonymous. Reading through the entries can be a brutal experience, each entry more heartrending than the next. Breadwinners cast off overnight from jobs that they had held for decades. Months and months of futile job searches. Families nervously eyeing fast approaching dates when their last leg of social security will be kicked out from under them, raising the spectre of homelessness. Parents who can no longer look at their children without feeling shame and desperation over being unable to provide for them. “I will say one thing about unemployment. Whoever has not experienced unemployment will have difficulty understanding where we are and where we are going. There is no greater truth in our time that ‘unemployment is violence’. Raw violence,” Kasdaglis says.
Kasdaglis has now selected 155+1 stories from the ‘Diary’ and assembled them with additional linking texts in an eponymous book that was published last week in Greece, by the publishing house of Kastaniotis. A book about unemployment by the unemployed, it undeniably provides insight into the dark emotional journey that so often accompanies joblessness.
Kasdaglis has already focused on the plight of the unemployed in an earlier book Anonymoi Chreokopimenoi (Anonymous Bankrupts), a collection of sketches published in 2012 about the effect of the crisis on people’s lives, including his own experience with unemployment.
Anonymous Bankrupts was featured in an April 2013 article in The Nation by noted historian Mark Mazower about the increasing body of ‘crisis literature’ that has emerged in Greece over the past few years. Mazower describes Kasdaglis’ sketches as a “mordant account of the spreading unemployment and unrelenting weariness of living through the crisis at a daily level” but adds that “Kasdaglis can hardly be accused of indulging in pessimism: in the current climate, pessimism seems perfectly reasonable”.
“Now all one can do is write in the hope of finding some way out of hopelessness,” Mazower writes of Kasdaglis’ view of the crisis. But it is also an apt description of the motivation of many of those who logged on and contributed their stories to Diary of the Unemployed.
Beyond the book as a stand-alone work, Kasdaglis sees its publication as the closing of one chapter and the opening of another. One that will help empower the unemployed to move beyond their exclusion from the public discourse and to speak up and make demands, “breaking the taboo” as he puts it. The Diary of the Unemployed is more than a book, but a multimedia platform intended to offer more than just a place to vent anger and sorrow to those who have borne the brunt of the more disastrous economic policies implemented in Greece. It is a place for a community to unite and demand that they are listened to, and not just be treated as another number.
“Self organisation is the key. Nobody will provide an answer to the problem if the unemployed don’t collectively and combatively fight for their lives, their dignity and chiefly for their right to create,” Kasdaglis says. “There is a part of society which is content with the idea (regardless of whether they have also been hurt) that it is logical for half of society to be sacrificed in order for the other half to be saved. This cannibalism is of course a complete utopia but until that is understood, the destruction will have reached frightening proportions. Read the book and you will remember me.”
* This is an edited version of an article that was first published in ThePressProject.