By Alexia Saoulli
TRADE unions yesterday welcomed the Cabinet’s decision to withdraw a bill, which would have regulated the right to strike in essential services by law.
“The old government wanted to pass a law that regulated how strikes were carried out in services that met peoples’ basic, essential needs,” said PASYDY Secretary-general Glafcos Hadjipetrou. These services included hospitals, fire departments, airports and the electricity authority. “The new government has withdrawn the bill,” he said.
Eight years after the bill was first introduced, the Cabinet officially withdrew it on Thursday, the Employers and Industrialists Federation (OEV) said yesterday.
“We foresaw this and have called for alternative solutions to the existing and serious problems that are often brought on because of the absence of strike regulations in essential services,” it said.
Hadjipetrou added: “As a union, along with PEO, SEK and OEV, we supported that strikes needed to be regulated, but that this should have been done by drawing up a code, which would regulate strike procedures and behaviour, rather than making it a law.” In essence, a gentleman’s agreement, he said.
The previous DISY government had wanted strikes regulated by law, he added. “We believed a code of agreement would have been workable. Had we tried out this system and it had failed, we were prepared to review the situation, but the old government refused to listen because they were afraid smaller unions would be a problem.” Hadjipetrou said large unions such as PEO, SEK and PASYDY always adhered to certain procedures and did not take things into their own hands and act alone.
According to Government Spokesman Kypros Chrysostomides, the Cabinet considered the right to strike “constitutionally secure and it is, from now on, up to social groups to secure working relationships that do not call for the need to limit any of those rights”.
All four major unions yesterday supported the Cabinet’s decision and called for the government to press ahead with the decision to form a code, which they had reached in 1999. No one at the Labour Ministry was available for comment.
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.
