“The Greek Crisis Ends here Tonight”: A qualitative study of labor market deregulation in Greece beyond the “Crisis” paradigm

The concept of crisis appears to be a useful tool for characterizing many of the seismic historical events of the 21st century thus far, and many scholars have interpreted it following Agamben’s elaboration of the state of exception. Following this paradigm, the crisis period in Greece also constitutes a violent rupture with the previous state of relative normality that spanned the whole social spectrum. However, in this article we dispute this line of argument, showing how the current crisis serves rather to mask a number of pre-existing processes. We do so through a qualitative analysis of workers’ perceptions, over time, of one of the most emblematic phenomena of the so-called Greek crisis: labor market deregulation.