"My Low Wage Life"

Though I have not worked in a low wage job in my life, I have some close friends who are students back in Greece who have actually been through such a difficult life. This helps me have an image of how hard it is to work in the private sector for less than 10$ per hour. Most friends of mine are working as waiters in parallel with their studies. They try really hard to balance these two important parts of their lives in order to be able, on one hand succeed in their studies and on the other hand earn money to pay their everyday expenses.

Most friends of mine usually work overtime almost everyday during the summer in order to earn as much money as possible to make the year. “This can’t continue on happening”, is what they tell me. They are tired of working so hard to earn so little money. All students are complaining about this problem. Even if they have an excellent high school degree and a major in what they are working in, they are still unable to find a job in the private sector with a decent wage. ‘Wages are very low for graduates and senior workers; imagine how much less they are for students’.

My best friend used to work as a waiter in Athens for about a year and in the end had to quit because ‘it wasn’t worth it’. He had such a time-pressured schedule due to his many working and college hours that he decided that the money wasn’t worth the whole pressure. The government must help the working students and make laws that prevent them from being exploited. Another experience that I was told about from another friend of mine was that employers are hesitant to hire students because they are ‘difficult to work with’. Employers don’t want to spend time and money on training inexperienced young students even graduates, which leaves these young people unemployed and in the end are force to get a job in an unskilled low wage life. From the 70% of students who work in Greece, the majority of that is working for a low wage job and more than half of them are qualified to work for a better-paid job. All these people are all around us but not if we aren’t related to them, we don’t really think about their problem. I really feel sorry for all of my friends that have to work so hard for such unskilled jobs in order to earn as much money as possible to get through their academic life.

Despite the fact that these people are up across many difficulties when searching for a job, young Greek students receive very little assistance by the government. Unlike other European countries where jobseekers can rely on the advice of experts, students are mostly left on themselves without a structured environment in which to identify vacant positions and apply for them. Students are not respected by not being able to work for a decent wage that will make them live properly. Students in Greece must be given the opportunity to earn the amount of money they deserve, and the country must not disregard them, as they are its future.