First of all, how is the economy going? It's bad. Really bad. Retail is dead, you see empty abandoned shops in the "main street" of major cities in Greece. Car dealerships, home brokers, anything having to do with consumption is down 50% or more compared to the times before the debt crisis hit our country. This of course affects service industry workers in these shops and their suppliers.
Unemployment has skyrocketed from 8-9% to around 17% these days. Keep in mind that this is a gross understatement given that there are many unemployed people that can't enroll for unemployment benefits because of their profession. All engineers for example ( like myself ) are either self employed or employed by a company. If I get fired from my current employer I can't file for unemployment benefits because I am automagically considered "self employed" and still have to pay social security ( medicair and public pension fund ) taxes. Crazy huh?
Now for the riots part...It all boils down to tax evasion and cutting priviledges.
Social unrest comes from many parts. Workers in the private sectors and pensioners, being pretty much the only ones that can't hide their income from the state are being disproportionally taxed. If you factor in income tax, extremely high VAT ( like sales tax in many ways only that it's 23% instead of 0-10%), high taxes in ownership of land, homes and cars and several tax increases a worker in the private sector ends up paying 60-70% of his income in taxes. And the return on investment is low. It's not as bad as being in the states where you are pretty much on your own for health and education costs, but it's nowhere near scandinavian countries where it should be based on the tax burden.
On top of that there are several one time taxes that end up being semi permanent being imposed 3 years in a row.
That's unfair and the reason that the workforce of this country is so pissed off at this situation.
On the other hand you have workers at the public sector. Government decided to cut their wages by 25-30% across the board. That was *freaking* unfair for the good and hard working ones. No matter if they were being paid peanuts like teachers or really well like specialized skills workers in ministries and R&D departments they were having the false impression that they were leaving a career for the stability of a public sector job. Instead of fighting corruption and fire bad workers, the politicians decided to go the easy way and cut wages across the board. Corrupted public sector workers who work off of bribes didn't even break a sweat as their legal income is just their tips for the bribes they get. Corruption is a big issue for everyone and everyone is pissed off nowadays about having to bribe someone to get his job done and the government has done shit about it. That's why we are pissed off.
Politicians were orchestrating the whole corruption game and many of them have evidently profited from it but noone has gone to jail. There is a former member of the parliament who was proud to declare that "I enter the politics owning just a pair of torn shoes" a few years ago. Guys like him own more than 50 properties and have several millions in savings. And not a single one has gone to jail for all of it.
In this whole situation add in some professions that were protected from competition and were pretty much a "family business" profiting the few thousands of professionals owning the state owned permits. These were permits being traded in the black market for as much as 200,000 euros. These permits were given out decades ago from the greek state in a limited number to those being friends of the ruling party or having the connections to get them. These were licenses to own a cab, or a moving truck or even to transport good from one end of the country to the other. Being limited in number, there was always demand and guaranteed income from owning one of them. "Free" market and corruption at its best!
You can study being a pharmacist but unless your family runs a pharmacy you aren't allowed to open up a pharmacy and have to work for peanuts ( being an illegal worker with no pension rights for below the minimum wage salary ) for the family that owns the pharmacy.
These people are relenting to give up their high profits and guaranteed income for something less.
So public unrest will continue to matter what the government does. Unless social fairness is established, everyone will have their own reasons to be mad about what's going on. That being said, I believe that the "pissed off citizens" movement in Syntagma square is a sign that there is still hope. And they have proved for 2 months now that we can protest in peace and that the people can put pressure on politicians to change both them and our country.
