Entering the city’s manufacturing centre

Textile merchant Alexandros Ichtiaroglou, who has a store at the centre of Thessaloniki, notes: ‘I remember the time when scores of manufacturing units were cropping up and we could have 10 to 15 couples a day coming to our shop and saying, “Hi, we want to open a manufacturing business and we’re here to look at textiles”. Those people were not particularly educated and many of them didn’t know the job, but they were unemployed at the time and manufacturing gave them jobs’.

That period also came to be associated with informal labour, carried out mainly by women doing piecework at workshops around the city or makeshift workshops at home.

A woman who used to do piecework at a workshop described her experience: ‘A shirt finishing business takes shirts that have already been constructed, puts in buttons and button holes, irons them, packages them in individual bags and sends them back to the manufacturer for sale. So, along with my husband at the time, we started a shirt finishing business, a third-party manufacturing unit which put buttons and button holes on shirts, ironed them and packaged them. This went on from ’96 until 2000. We had to rent a space of our own because this job requires machinery that takes up a lot of room. The job itself is very hard. First of all, there is no schedule, no weekends or holidays. Depending on who you work with, there is also a lot of pressure and stress in manufacturing. People bring things over and want them ready yesterday.’ 

However, the mid-1990s marked the start of a long decline for the clothing manufacturing sector. A textile merchant points out: ‘From 1996 until the beginning of the 2000s, we lost 85% of our clientele which were mostly small-scale manufacturers. It wasn’t because of the introduction of stores like Zara, it happened when we joined the European Economic Community. Until then, the Greek state protected businesses through the tariffs it collected. There were “export subsidies” given to exporting businesses, funded in part by the tariffs the state collected. When we joined the EEC, the businesses lost this source of income and were no longer sustainable.’

During the 1990s, employment rates in the wider clothing sector dropped, followed by a sharp decrease in clothing production. However, it wasn’t long before a new and expansive market in small items and garments emerged on the western outskirts of Thessaloniki’s centre: the Chinese market. Lately, due to the low rents and the age of the buildings in the neighbourhoods of Vardaris, many recent migrants have managed to find cheap housing there or a warehouse to host their business activities.