CYPRUS AIRWAYS (CY) pilots yesterday announced further industrial action for today, following the 24-hour strike, which ended at midnight last night.
A series of meetings and mediation efforts yesterday failed to solve the crisis and a new announcement, issued late yesterday afternoon by pilots union PALPU said the measures would be extended today if the company carries out a contentious training flight.
CY spokesman Tassos Angelis said today’s strike was due to begin at around 6.30am and end around 2pm. Management was locked in talks last night attempting to reschedule flights around the eight-hour stoppage and said it was too early to say how many passengers would be affected.
Some 1,500 passengers and 14 flights were affected by yesterday’s 24-hour strike, which began at midnight on Sunday and cost the company around £150,000.
The pilots called the strike action on Friday, which gave CY the chance to accommodate most of the passengers with other airlines, minimising disruption.
Angelis said that many of the passengers had been flown out with the national carrier on Sunday, and that the remainder were expected to leave in the early hours of this morning on special additional flights.
The government, anticipating further action by PALPU, yesterday gave special licences to CY’s charter firm Eurocypria and private Cypriot airline Helios to carry out schedule flights to affected destinations. It also gave special permission to Emirates Airlines and Royal Jordanian to pick up local trade for European destinations, and urged the public to continue booking their flights as normal.
Communicaitons and Works Minister Averoff Neophytou said that from now on Cypriot travellers should not worry about Cyprus Airways strikes.
Commenting on the government’s decision to grant special licences to the four other airlines, Angelis said: “How can we feel? We cannot prevent the government from taking action to keep air transport going
PALPU members are objecting to pilots, classed as management staff who carry out training flights. One union member told the Cyprus Mail that the company had reorganised the flight operations department in such a way that these pilots were benefiting from being both pilots and managers and were being paid 20-30 per cent more than regular pilots. “If they want to be managers they should stay at their desks,” he said.
To press their point, today’s strike centres around a training flight to Amsterdam. PALPU said strike action would begin one and a half hours before the flight and end half an hour after the training flight returned in the afternoon to Larnaca, if the company went ahead with it.
Yesterday’s set of meetings to solve the dispute began with management meeting the airline’s four other unions to learn their positions on the strike, Angelis said. “They told us they would undertake an initiative to speak to the pilots union,” he said.
Following that, the CY board of directors held an extraordinary meeting with management and decided on a series of measures in case the strike action escalated. Mediation at the Labour Ministry began around 1pm, Angelis said. It ended at around 7.30pm without any solution.
An announcement from CY following mediation failure condemned the pilots’ “contempt for Cypriot society”. “We will not give in to the blackmail of a small arrogant group,” the statement said.
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.
