Sweeping changes in Greece

For more than a year, cleaning women in Greece have been the symbol of the injustices of austerity. They started to protest after they lost their jobs due to budget cuts deemed necessary by the Finance Ministry to meet the conditions for the 240 billion euro EU-IMF bailout plan.

For months they camped outside the finance ministry’s office demanding their jobs back.
And then they voted for Syriza, the party which promised to re-hire them. It was a promise to right the wrongs that one cleaning woman, Sophia Tsagaropoulou, feels many Greeks have endured: “For five years, people have paid for a crisis they were not responsible for. During this crisis people who were earning lots of money continued earning lots of money, and even earned more. But the middle and lower class were not to blame for everything, but they are paying for it all. We were plunged from paradise into a living hell.”

But working out how to clean up the “living hell” produced by austerity measures will be a tall orde