Hotel strike enters fifth day – management says unaffected

STAFF at two Larnaca hotels yesterday entered their fifth day of strike action in protest at the dismissal of 73 workers.

The 30 to 40 strikers yesterday – as on previous days – picketed the Golden Bay and Lordos Beach hotels.

A third hotel affected by the dismissals, the Golden Coast, has been closed for the winter season.

At a press conference at the Golden Bay yesterday, Constantinos Lordos, the president of Lordos Holdings, which owns the two hotels, said management was entirely within its rights to dismiss the workers – a move made necessary by steady losses in recent years at the hotels, amounting to more then £2.5 million.

He said the decision to contract out work to outside companies in the three departments affected had been necessary to avoid further losses. This, he explained, had resulted in dismissals in the house-keeping, bakery and gym sections of each hotel.

Lordos repeated that the day-to-running of the hotels had not in any way been affected by the strike.

The Cyprus Hotels Association yesterday condemned the strike, saying hotels had to be allowed to hand over sections to the outside companies in order to remain competitive.

Unions, meanwhile, yesterday remained adamant that the strike would continue until the sacked workers were reinstated.

They also announced a possible meeting of hotel worker representatives from all over Cyprus today.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.