THE NEW YORK TIMES REPORTS FROM ATHENS

Describing the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation, known as ERT, as a “haven of waste,” a government spokesman said ERT, which went off the air at 11 p.m. local time, would reopen soon as a “modern state organization” with a fraction of the current staff.

ERT employees, who were among the 3,000 people gathered outside the broadcaster’s headquarters north of Athens on Tuesday night, vowed to stage a sit-in until the government rescinded the order, while members of Greece’s fragile governing coalition said that they, too, would resist the move.

Analysts said the decision to shut down the broadcaster, which does not require lawmakers’ approval, was a measure of both the government’s desperation and its determination to find a way to cut public jobs.

The move came just days after one of Greece’s lenders, the International Monetary Fund — while acknowledging “serious errors” in the austerity policies it has imposed on the country — chastised the government as having failed to take “politically difficult measures” to shrink the public sector since it received its first bailout in 2010.

Athens promised its creditors this week to dismiss 4,000 civil servants this year, including 2,000 by the end of the summer and 15,000 by the end of 2014.

That may not sound daunting in a public work force of around 650,000. Yet, through more than three years of drastic budget cuts and a rapidly shrinking economy, the debt-ridden country has yet to fire a single government employee.

To understand what the government is up against, consider the case of Georgia Tsiounis and more than 10,000 other “temporary” workers. Eight years after landing a four-month contract with the municipality of Athens to water flowers and trim trees while other workers were on vacation, she was told recently that her services would be eliminated after her latest contract ends.

Rather than meekly accepting her fate, she turned to the well-worn tactic of filing a restraining order seeking to make the job permanent.

While she may well lose in court, legal analysts say, she cannot be fired while the case is pending. Given the glacial pace of Greece’s overburdened and inefficient court system, her case and thousands more like it will not be heard for nearly two years.

“I am suing to keep food on the table,” Mrs. Tsiounis said recently. “If I am let go amid high unemployment, where will I find work?”

Three years into Europe’s debt crisis, Greece, along with Spain, Portugal and other countries on the region’s troubled southern rim, are under increased pressure to revitalize government by cutting older, low-skilled workers and bringing in younger workers with advanced degrees and computer skills. In an ideal world, a refurbished civil service would improve efficiency in everything from policy making to tax collection, and set Greece more firmly on the path to recovery.

But roadblocks remain. Greece’s civil service is littered with longtime employees who got jobs through political favors, jobs-for-votes schemes or pure nepotism, despite pressure from creditors to clean house.

Greece has already shed 128,000 of the 150,000 civil service positions that the so-called troika of lenders — the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank — demanded to be cut, mainly through retirements and reduced hiring. Ranks have been thinned to around 650,000 people today from 970,000 in 2009, when the civil service constituted nearly a third of Greece’s work force.

Creditors still want 15,000 cuts by the end of next year, which in some ways is an exercise in penance: Since the public work force has already shrunk significantly, the rest of the cuts are “really symbolic,” said Antonis Manitakis, a constitutional scholar tapped by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras to oversee the streamlining of the civil service. “The troika mainly wants us to show we have the political will to reform.”