As a pharmaceutical salesman in Greece for 17 years, Tilemachos Karachalios
wore a suit, drove a company car and had an expense account. He now mops
schools in Sweden, forced from his home by Greece’s economic crisis.
“It was a very good job,” said Karachalios, 40, of his former life. “Now I
clean Swedish s---.”
Karachalios, who left behind his six-year-old daughter to be raised by his
parents, is one of thousands fleeing Greece’s record 24 percent unemployment and austerity measures
that threaten to undermine growth. The number of Greeks seeking permission to
settle in Sweden, where there are more jobs and a stable economy, almost
doubled to 1,093 last year from 2010, and is on pace to increase again this
year.
“I’m trying to survive,” Karachalios said in an interview in Stockholm.
“It’s difficult here, very difficult. I would prefer to stay in Greece. But we
don’t have jobs.”
Greece is in its fifth year of recession, with the economy expected to
contract 6.9 percent this year, the same as in 2011, according to the
Athens-based Foundation for
Economic and Industrial Research. Since 2008, the number of
jobless has more than tripled to a record 1.22 million as of June, out of a
total population of 10.8 million.
“In Greece, there was no future,” said Ourania Michtopoulou, who moved with
her husband to Sweden in 2010 after both lost
textile industry jobs in Thessaloniki, where they had a comfortable life with a
house and car. “Here, I can hope for something good to happen. Maybe not for me
-- I’m 48 -- but maybe for my children.”
‘Go Home’
Their family now crams into a small apartment, while her husband, Nikos,
works for a landscaper and her teenage children struggle with Swedish lessons.
“It was not easy for them,” she said. “My daughter said lots of times, ‘I hate
Sweden -- I want to go home.’”
Karachalios began his career in pharmaceutical sales after his mandatory
military service, working at three different companies in the southern city of
Patras. He married a Chinese woman he met at the 2004 Athens Olympics, had a
daughter, and divorced.
“You can plan, you can organize, you can make plans for 10 years, 20 years,
but you don’t know what life brings,” he said.
An intense man with flecks of gray in his thinning black hair, Karachalios
said he has lost 20 to 30 pounds since moving to Sweden. His hands are stained
with grime. Instead of the suits and ties he once wore, he now dresses in jeans
and work boots. His suits remain in Greece.
Lost Job
In Homer’s Odyssey, Telemachus is the son of Odysseus, a Greek hero who
spent 10 years struggling to return home from the Trojan War. Karachalios was
named after a great-uncle who was a favorite of his parents.
Karachalios’s troubles began in early 2010 when the Greek government, which
provides health care, forced drugmakers to cut their prices by as much as 27
percent. To reduce costs, his then-employer PharmaSwiss fired him and two other
salesmen, leaving his former supervisor to manage the accounts, he said.
Karachalios searched for jobs and eventually spent two months in 2011 as a
telemarketer in Athens. He quit after not being paid. An ill-fated attempt to
start a retirement home cost him months of work and most of his savings.
Determined to move, Karachalios considered Australia before rejecting the
immigration process as too expensive. He had a friend in Sweden, had visited
before and knew its reputation.
“I knew they were very organized,” he said. “Everyone pays their taxes and
it’s fair. There is no cheating.”
Single Dish
Karachalios arrived in March. His friend helped him find a room to rent and
he pays 4,500 Swedish krona ($670) a month for a room in a quiet apartment
complex that houses other immigrants, many from the Middle East.
His studio has no stove or oven, just a hot plate and microwave. He has a
single dish, and when he has a guest, he eats out of a plastic container that
used to hold feta cheese. A tiny Greek flag is taped to the wall. The room came
with a television though Karachalios said he never watches. In the evenings, if
he has the energy, he studies Swedish.
Because of his background in health care, Karachalios at first applied for
jobs caring for the elderly. He was rejected without an interview because he
didn’t speak Swedish.
To find a job, he began knocking on doors of restaurants and janitorial
companies, and eventually found a position cleaning rental houses. It was hard,
lonely work that didn’t allow a break for lunch, he said. His first week wasn’t
paid because he was told he was being trained. After his second week, when he
was paid for only 32 hours instead of the 40 he said he worked, he wasn’t
called back.
Frugal Living
In July, he found work with a cleaning contractor run by another Greek.
Although the hours are long and the work difficult, Karachalios said he is at
least treated fairly.
In Greece, Karachalios was paid between 2,500 and 3,000 euros
($3,143-$3,772) a month, after taxes. In Stockholm, he makes 80 krona an hour.
Based on a 40-hour work week, that equals about $1,907 a month.
“I was doing something more glamorous but I don’t mind this work,” he said.
“I feel alive again. When you are unemployed too long, it’s very hard. I was
angry all the time.”
Karachalios wasn’t paid until mid-August for work he did in July. In the
meanwhile, he lives frugally, saving half-smoked cigarettes while he waits for
his parents to wire money. He also worries about finding another job, which
will be necessary once school resumes and the cleaning contract ends. If he
can’t find a permanent job in Stockholm, he said he may move with his daughter
to Shanghai, where his ex-wife lives.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go and work, and it would be helpful for my
daughter,” he said.
Little Contact
There are now 1.4 million foreign-born people in Sweden, or 15 percent of
the population, an increase from virtually none at the end of World War II.
While Sweden prides itself on being a tolerant and progressive nation, an
anti-immigration party drew 5.7 percent of the vote in 2010, the most ever,
said Klas
Borell, a Swedish professor of sociology.
At the schools Karachalios cleans, he has little contact with Swedes. The
principal of one school in Uppsala, Andreas Kembler, said that while he doesn’t
know the janitors by name, he makes a point to say hello to them in the hall.
The students have been learning about the crisis in Greece, and about the
implications of unemployment, Kembler said.
When told about Karachalios, Kembler says he is troubled that Greeks are
forced from their homes in pursuit of work.
Wrong Reasons
“I can see, now that our economy is strong and theirs is weak, that it may
be natural to move somewhere where there are still jobs,” Kembler said. “I also
feel that the move should be for the right reasons, positive reasons, and that
in his case there must have been a certain amount of duress that he was under,
which of course isn’t an appealing thought that he was forced to move away from
his family.”
Karachalios wakes at 5 a.m. with the sun already up because of the long
Swedish summer days. He checks Facebook on his phone for news from Greece and
takes the subway one stop to Rinkeby, a gritty working-class neighborhood. Near
the station is a parking lot where people without homes sleep in their cars,
leaving their shoes and bottles of water outside the doors.
At a litter-strewn gas station just off the highway, Karachalios waits for
a van to pick him up. Other migrant workers, headed for other destinations,
wait nearby. He smiles with anticipation: once he’s in the van he’ll borrow a
co- worker’s iPhone to talk with his daughter, Katerina, on Skype.
Katerina’s Day
When they talk, it’s about her day in Greece: her trip to the beach with
her grandparents, what she’ll have for breakfast. He wants to bring her to
Stockholm but won’t until he has a stable job and living situation.
Talking with Katerina is a highlight of his day and he was crushed when his
laptop stopped working and he couldn’t Skype with her on her birthday. Now, he
checks in with his parents by calling on his mobile phone and hanging up, and
they do the same, so they don’t have to pay for the call.
After a cigarette with his co-workers -- all immigrants from Greece --
Karachalios piles into the van for the 45-minute drive to the outskirts of
Uppsala, a small city north of Stockholm. Today’s job is to finish cleaning the
elementary school they began working on yesterday. They start at 7:30 a.m. and
work 2 1/2 hours before breaking. For lunch, they share their food, with
Karachalios bringing fried meatballs for the group.
Family Distressed
Karachalios is charged with cleaning the dozens of double- paned windows,
which takes its toll on his back and shoulders. On other days, he cleans
floors. In his pocket, he carries a razor blade for scraping the gum off
linoleum.
His decision to leave Greece has been hard on his family back home, sister
Nikki Karachalios said. Just one year older, she and her husband lived in the
same apartment complex as Karachalios and their daughters are the same age.
“As a family, we have always been very close and now it’s difficult,” she
said in a phone interview.
Their father, who had been hospitalized with a respiratory condition, is
particularly distressed, Nikki Karachalios said. Still, they all understand why
he left, she said.
“He was very unhappy,” she said. “He had no money, he was completely broke,
he had loans for the house he couldn’t pay. There was nothing for him here, he
was staying home for days because he had no place to go.”
‘Serious Decision’
Two years ago, Nikki Karachalios lost her own job working for a French
construction company when a planned highway from Patras to Athens was canceled.
Her husband, a commercial sailor, is also without work and does odd jobs for
his brother.
The family is supported by her father’s 700 euro-a-month social security
check, which buys groceries and little else. She expects that payment to be
reduced as the government makes a new round of cuts. She is considering moving
to Stockholm, as well.
“By the end of the year I will have to make a serious decision about the
future of my family,” she said.
In Sweden, struggling to make sense of Greece’s decline, Tilemachos
Karachalios suggests a conspiracy by Germany and France to economically cripple
the country in order to seize its Aegean oil reserves. He’s also bitter about
comments made by former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, who said in interviews
abroad in 2009 that corruption and tax evasion were to blame for Greece’s
problems.
“Who, me?” Karachalios said. “I’m not lazy. I didn’t steal from the
government. I was honest and they made me like this, to come here.”
Unpredictable Future
What gnaws at him is the uncertainty that comes from not having a stable
job or predictable future.
“I’m tired of all this,” he said. “I want to close my eyes and wake up in
10 years and not have to worry.”
Migrants to Sweden from within the European Union are free to look for work
and can settle if they can provide for themselves or have family there.
Although the unemployment rate is 7 percent, finding
work can be difficult if new arrivals don’t speak Swedish, said Arto Moksunen,
director of Crossroads, a nonprofit group in
Stockholm that has provided assistance to 3,000 migrants since March 2011.
Konstantinos Fraggidis, who is the president of a Greek cultural
association in Stockholm, said he fields 10 to 15 e- mails a day from Greeks
asking about working and living conditions in Sweden.
“You can read how desperate these young people are,” Fraggidis said. “Here
suddenly, you see them by themselves trying to leave Greece, not only their
village but to leave the country. They have taken the big step and it is very
traumatic.”
Always Tired
As his day ends, Karachalios returns to his room, cooks a simple meal and
goes to bed. After five months in Stockholm, his life has settled into a
routine. On weekends, he cleans his apartment, does his laundry and sleeps. He
is almost always tired and has few people to talk to. He contrasts that to his
life in Greece, where he spent weekends chatting with his parents over coffee
and taking his daughter to the playground.
Even with his contempt of Greek politicians, Karachalios is proud of his
country. The Stockholm subway isn’t as good as Athens’s metro, he says. Swedes
aren’t as tidy as Greeks.
“I want to die in Greece,” Karachalios said. “I want to leave my bones in
Greece.”
The resumption of school this month means the end of the cleaning company’s
contract. Karachalios found another temporary cleaning job and also lined up
part-time work delivering newspapers that will pay 7,000 krona ($1,038) a
month. That job requires a car, and he spent what little money he had -- about
3,000 krona -- buying one. Two miles after getting behind the wheel, the car
broke down, leaving Karachalios despondent and considering a return to Greece.
“To get to be 40 years old, it’s very hard to accept that your life is
going to be like this,” Karachalios said.
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