Smaro Maniati’s office in Athens Home Services in Central Athens.

 

By Marissa Michaels

ATHENS — At Athens Home Services, located on the fourth floor of an otherwise quiet and dark building, three women sat waiting in a cheery office, but refused to be photographed or interviewed.

The possibility of their names being published made them noticeably nervous.  A Filipina woman laughed and shook her head but would not speak, even to say “no.” Another woman said that her name was Mimi but would not concede further information.

With forlorn looks, the women would say only that their employers have worked them harder and harder as the Greek economy has plummeted. Their backs now ache.

“When you don’t have money running out of pocket, you ask more for your money and you expect everything,” explained Smaro Maniati, the founder and owner of Athens Home Services.

Greece’s financial crisis, which hit in 2009, has made life harder for almost everyone. The unemployment rate skyrocketed, many public services were cut, and people had to tighten their budgets.

Greece’s vibrant industry of domestic workers, composed mostly of migrants from countries such as the Philippines, Ethiopia, Georgia, and Bulgaria, was also affected.

In Greece, it is common for families to hire workers who live in their homes to take care of dishes, laundry, children and elderly family members. Over half of all migrant women in Greece do domestic work.

Athens Home Services, which Maniati founded in January of 2009, connects domestic workers to homes in Athens.

While many other industries plummeted, Maniati’s business prospered. “It went reverse,” she noted.

Maniati explained that when the financial crisis hit Greece, the demographics of her clientele changed. Before the crisis, plenty of middle-class homes had domestic workers. But once the economy crashed, these people were unable to afford extra expenses.

“Once the crisis hit those households, they fired the person. So, it was really small houses with everyday people who used these services, but they didn’t need it anymore,” Maniati explained.

As the crisis hit, households with small incomes fired workers, but a new market emerged. Wealthy people who previously had no need to work long hours began working more to compensate for slashes to their income. With these long hours, many ended up providing funds for domestic workers to ensure their children were cared for.

Maniati explained, “The people who wanted to work harder, to make more money exactly because of the crisis, spent more hours working. Suddenly, it was a necessity to have someone back home to look after the kids and the house.”

“You had to work more hours to make less money,” according to Maniati.

The demographics of those who need housekeepers has shifted, but business has done well for Maniati. “So the reality is that what has been lost on one side, balances with the people who actually needed the services,” she said.

Greece does not keep official statistics on domestic workers, many of whom work illegally, so it is unclear if this trend is consistent with data from other companies. Some workers think Maniati’s company might be unique.

 

Cueto in the migrant-populated neighborhood of Kypseli.

 

Noriel Cueto, 37, left his home in the Philippines to come work for a family in Athens when he was just 19. He came when his aunt, already stationed in Athens, told him about an open position. In Athens, he met his Filipino wife and had three children.

When the crisis hit, his wife was fired from her job as a domestic worker and had to move back to the Philippines with the children.

In Cueto’s view, the market for domestic workers shrunk significantly when the crisis started.

“Before that, every year, somebody come (sic.) from my family…but when it hit crisis (sic.), they stopped getting people from outside,” Cueto noted, observing that his own family could no longer get jobs in Athens.

Cueto considers himself lucky to have maintained employment with a family throughout the crisis. He said, “It’s like home.” With this job, he was able to escape a lifetime of picking rice for a poor wage in the Philippines.

With a crashing economy, immigrants fled

Regardless of the wider economy, Maniati is pleased with how her company has done in the past 10 years. Maniati considers Athens Home Services to be an expensive agency, and initially worried that this would turn off customers during Greece’s financial crisis. Though the economy has crashed, her company has seen a steady rise in the demand for live-in domestic workers.

In fact, she noted that she often does not have enough  workers to meet the demands of her clients, even with her database of 8,500 workers.

Maniati attributes the dearth of domestic workers to the exodus of migrants from Greece after the financial crisis. Those who were able to leave fled when they realized the economy was plummeting, before many European countries closed their borders in 2016.

Cueto affirmed that many migrants fled Greece after the crisis in 2009, including many domestic workers. “It’s a lot. Some of them went to France, London. And some…they’re going back home to the Philippines for good instead of staying here with nothing to do,” he said.

According to an academic study, ‘Migration in Greece Developments in 2012,’ “There are signs that Albanian immigrants are returning to their home country (different estimates are provided by Albanian sources, ranging between 28,000 and 100,000 people).”

“Even though there was still a lot of work, they thought it’s going to be better abroad,” Maniati said.

A fountain that reads “Solidarity with migrants – smash fasism (sic.) in the Athens neighborhood of Kypseli, which is home to many migrant domestic workers.

 

Though some of the domestic work industry is conducted under the table, Maniati’s company is legal and high-paying, so it bothers her that many migrants have fled.

Maniati affirmed that the salaries for her workers are high, both compared to the Greek minimum wage and wages in other countries like Cyprus.

Greece’s minimum wage is $650 per month. Her worker’s base monthly salary is $800, with some earning up to $2000 every month. The live-in workers also receive accommodations and insurance.

Maniati lamented that she cannot find enough workers to fill her clientele’s needs. Most companies in Greece though are not facing these same problems. The unemployment rate is still at 18.1% and migrants have not stopped entering.

Athens Home Services might be an anomaly for surviving Greece’s crisis, but it did not come out on the other side unchanged.