CYPRUS Airways (CY) stewards yesterday backed down on their threat to go on a one-day strike after accepting to enter a dialogue on outstanding issues relating to the airline’s controversial rescue package.
Stewards union SYPKA also accepted to carry out flights to Manchester, Birmingham and Amsterdam without overnight stays, the issue that had sparked the initial dispute. The strike had been due for yesterday.
However, SYPKA chairman Andreas Koutouroushis said the union’s acceptance of the situation was not permanent, as the move by the company was still a violation of their collective agreement and would need to be discussed.
He said the union had agreed only because the airline and the government needed to show the EU that the company was viable and stable in order to secure the loan for £60 million that CY needed.
“After a meeting with the board of directors, they asked that nothing be changed on the strategic plan for at least 20 days in order for the EU to approve the granting of the loan,” Koutouroushis told the Cyprus Mail yesterday.
“We thought about it and no matter what they say it is still a violation and we will not accept this as standard practice.”
It is against international regulations for one crew to work more than a 12-hour shift. Overnight stays are, however, very expensive for the airline staff in terms of expenses and allowances.
Koutouroushis said that as the CY board was new, the union had decided to give them a chance as long as they were being honest with the employees on the state of the company.
SYPKA, along with pilots’ union PASIPY, were the only two of CY’s five unions that never officially accepted the strategic plan the cash-strapped airline needs to survive.
It is believed the union was forced to back down on its strike threat after failing to secure the support of the pilots. If pilots are flying, striking cabin crew can be replaced from non-striking unions.
But Koutouroushis denied that CY’s biggest union CYNIKA, which has a number of cabin crew on its books, could have covered flights affected by the SYPKA strike.
“They don’t have enough many cabin crew to cover a strike by our union,” Koutouroushis said. He said that out of a total cabin crew of 310, SYPKA had 250 as members. “That’s around 75 per cent,” he said.
The weekend strike threat has caused a ripple of tension between the two unions, particularly when Koutouroushis earlier yesterday publicly accused CYNIKA of looking out for its own interests and of “doing favours” for certain people when it came to flying rotas.
“There are other unions with different views,” he told state radio.
CYNIKA chairman Costas Demetriou responded by saying Koutouroushis was the one ‘fixing’ rotas to suit him and his wife, also a CY employee.
Demetriou told the Cyprus Mail that SYPKA’s approach to the strike action had been wrong from the beginning.
“At the end of the day all they were doing was preventing the Ministry’s proposal for the survival of the company. They just made all this trouble to gain more members to their union,” he said.
“In any case if the pilots were not prepared to support them in their strike, they had no chance to succeed.”
CY’s new chairman Lazaros Savvides yesterday welcomed the SYPKA decision not to go ahead with a strike.
“We welcome the decision to start a dialogue and the positive and professional move by unions not to see the public inconvenienced,” Savvides said.
He said meetings had been held over the past few days to try and find a way forward. “We laid all the cards on the table and came to this positive result, and I am glad the public was not inconvenienced at the last minute.”
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