CYPRUS enters 2010 with unemployment at its worst since the invasion of 1974, and predicted to rise in months ahead. For the 21,000 or so registered unemployed – around 5.5 per cent of the working population – it will have been a bleak New Year, while many still in work will be worried about their own job security, as the broader economy feels the pinch from the double whammy suffered to its once proud pillars of tourism and construction.
Indeed, the director of the Employers’ and Industrialists’ Federation warned in December that he expected unemployment to rise to 6.6 per cent in the coming months, citing a survey conducted among his members which revealed that 36 per cent of businesses planned to lay off staff.
It’s a worrying time for the island’s economy, with no sign of the resilience that had seen Cyprus buck so many downward trends in decades past, weathering storms – both external and internal – to maintain impressive growth rates in a way that often baffled outside observers. In part, this is undoubtedly due to the more profound nature of the financial and economic crisis that has shaken the very foundations of the global economy – not just the trough of a boom and bust cycle, but a deep trauma seen as fundamentally changing behaviours in the years ahead.
There is also the sense that the chickens are finally coming home to roost on a disaster long foretold, one that was unfolding in Cyprus long before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 sparked the plunge into economic gloom. For years, the warning bells have sounded over an increasingly uncompetitive tourism market and the dangers of a turbo-charged property bubble. And for years, both industries and the authorities stuck their heads firmly in the sand, pricing themselves further and further off the market in a desperately short-sighted attempt to cream the last remaining profits.
But perhaps the greatest obstacle is that Cyprus has become a victim of its own success. With prosperity and education has come a culture of entitlement, replacing the hunger for social and economic advancement bred by the poverty of generations past. Two generations back, Cypriots scoured the world for work, leaving the island in droves to make successful lives abroad; one generation back, the victims of 1974 worked two, even three jobs to rebuild their livelihoods and provide a head-start in life for their children. Yet now those children, with a couple of degrees in hand, sit back at home in expectation of the perfect job.
An interview at the Nicosia benefit office just before Christmas told a telling tale of the nature of unemployment in Cyprus. All three people quoted had in effect ‘chosen’ to be unemployed rather than accept work they felt was mismatched to their expectations. One, a foreman on a building site, had been told he could no longer be kept on in his position, but was offered to stay on as a builder – he chose to leave; the second, a university graduate, had been given a job but decided to quit feeling it did not match his qualifications; the third, a qualified teacher in her early twenties, was only prepared to work in the public sector, and was willing to wait “for as long as it takes”.
The first, in his late forties and married with two children, admitted he would have to lower the bar if nothing came through in the weeks ahead. The other two were living at home with their parents, with no real pressure to compromise on their ambitions – and who can blame that generation, cushioned as it is by a parental safety net? They will probably get their jobs, if not now, then in a year’s time, but what does it mean for the economy – especially at a time like this?
What is happening is that a whole slice of the workforce is being wasted. Earlier generations would have started off with any job, working their way up the ladder. All along, they contributed to the economy, and to their own experience and professional ability, delivering a hard-working, savvy entrepreneurial culture with a startling eye for opportunity. It was a culture that transformed Cyprus, giving it a flexibility that allowed the island to withstand economic shocks of every kind.
Today, students take to the street to demonstrate for the right to be a civil servant, aspiring to a career whose only contribution to the economy is through its consumerist excess. Our society blames foreign workers for unemployment, while refusing to do the ‘lowly’ jobs that they’ve been brought to do, and failing to recognise the desire for betterment driving immigrants in the way it drove earlier generations of Cypriots.
If Cyprus is to dig itself out of this hole, its workforce needs to shed its yearning for sheltered security and reconnect with that hunger for hard work that drove the economy to defy the odds in years gone by. Otherwise, it will face a decade of economic pain as it faces the brutal reality of shattered dreams.
