WSJ, ATHENS - Greek
civil servants stand to lose the six extra days of paid vacation they get each
year -just for using a computer- after the government moved Friday to rescind a
privilege that has been around for more than two decades.
The bonus, known as “computer leave”,
applied to workers whose job involved sitting in front of a computer for more
than five hours a day - basically most of the staff working in ministries and
public services.
"It belongs to another era,"
Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the administrative reform minister, said. "Today, in
the era of crisis, we cannot maintain anachronistic privileges." Doing
away with this bonus, which dates to 1989, represents "a small, yet
symbolic, step in modernizing public administration," he said.
"According to the European regulation,
those using a computer should take a 15-minute break every two hours," the
general secretary Ermolaos Kasses said. "It is not easy to have all those
breaks during the day, so it was decided back then that it should be given as a
day off every two months."
