ATHENS, Greece (AP) — For decades, a job in Greece often came with certain guarantees.
Pharmacists could know they would make at least 35 percent profit on medicines, by law. Lawyers didn't have to worry about out-of-town rivals, who couldn't take up cases in their area. Truckers faced limited competition — only from people who could come up with €100,000 or more for a state license sold on the open market.
Cozy arrangements — and ones the Greek government says the country can no longer afford. Through the teeth of public protest, Prime Minister George Papandreou is asking parliament to eliminate a host of restrictive professional licenses as its desperately tries to improve the productivity of the Greek economy, stricken with a government debt crisis.
The protests are intensified because some people borrowed heavily to buy licenses and now face the prospect they will become worthless overnight.
More than 200,000 people in restricted professions — including lawyers, pharmacists, civil engineers as well as truckers and others. Their markets operate essentially as closed shops with tightly controlled licensing practices or fixed profit margins.
The government argues labor controls have been holding back an economy in urgent need of reinvention before international bailout loans run out in 2012.
Many low-paid Greeks, shut out of protected jobs and the country's massive civil service, tend to agree.
An Internet campaign group called Generation 700 Euros — named after the country's minimum monthly wage — argues restricted professions are to blame high consumer prices.
"This system of closed professions benefits the few rather than Greek society and state as a whole," the group said.
"Closed professions keep the income of those working in them artificially high without producing the corresponding quality and low cost for the consumer."
Some market restrictions date back more than 40 years, when governments were keen to win loyalty by handing out jobs and business licenses in return for votes, but were also used as part of welfare programs. Licenses for Greece's ubiquitous street kiosks selling tobacco and newspapers are still reserved for war veterans, the disabled and people with large families and low incomes.
Others will lose their safety net: No fixed minimum fee for civil engineers supervising contruction or hefty cuts on land deals for the notary public, as the government shreds Greece's dusty labor rulebook.
Business permits and licenses are currently tangled in regulations. To open a pharmacy, an applicant must be from the European Union, have graduated from a pharmacology school in Greece, and completed military service if male, and open his business in a area which does not have more than one pharmacy per 2,000 residents in the municipality.
Truckers, the first to be affected, lined up their vehicles along highways for 19 days in September, choking traffic and threatening fuel supplies.
Christos Katsoulis, a stout 65-year-old fuel-tanker driver, joined them, worried the measures taken during a recession will throw colleagues out of work or into minimum-wage jobs.
"There's no future for us. All they want is cheap labor," he said, standing in the middle of a two-mile line of trucks, as motorists stoically inched by.
"When something you own is taken from you, you have to react ... You can't change the rules overnight and expect businesses to survive," said Katsoulis, 65.
Prime Minister George Papandreou's 11-month-old government slashed pensions and civil service payrolls in a barrage of austerity measures this year, but is under pressure to make lasting changes while Greece's economy remains propped up by emergency loans.
In May, mounting debts and borrowing costs took Greece to the verge of bankruptcy, avoided only by the rescue loans worth €110 billion over three years from the eurozone governments and International Monetary Fund. Those lenders are pressing Greece to make wide-ranging structural change: loosen state control of power generation, stop bankrolling loss-making state enterprises, and liberalize tightly regulated professions that are sapping productivity.
If pushed through, the proposed deregulation could eventually boost gross domestic product by 10 percent, according to the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research, or IOBE, a Greek think-tank that advises the government.
More growth would mean more tax revenue and a better chance of Greece paying down its crushing debts.
Supporters of the reforms argue that licensing rules are an anachronism dating back decades when there was little international competition and governments were keen to win loyalty by handing out jobs and business licenses in return for votes.
The head of the truckers' union says it doesn't oppose the changes but their suddenness.
"Greece has charted its course and that's a fact. But things are not being done in an organized way. These measures have been delayed for fifty years, so there has to be a fair transition," truckers' union boss Giorgos Tzortzatos told the AP.
"Seventy percent of our members still haven't covered their license fee ... what will happen to these people?"
So far, protests have been limited compared with often-violent demonstrations in the spring, with unions holding six general strikes before the summer. Local government elections in November will test the public's tolerance of Papandreou's punishing reforms.
Gerasimos Routzounis, head of political research at polling firm Kappa Research, says the Socialists so far are holding on to public support. "They have a strong alibi because the country is on the brink of bankruptcy ... Our numbers suggest that people blame the previous government for what has happened," he said.
"When nations go through this kind of shock, people tend to rally around the leader and the government that can rescue them."
