LABOUR Minister Antonis Vassiliou yesterday launched an initiative to try and solve the dispute between Cyprus Airways (CY) and its pilots, who are staging a five-hour strike tomorrow.
CY spokesman Kyriacos Kyriacou said the initiative would be ongoing in an attempt to prevent further strike action by the pilots union PASIPY in the coming weeks.
Meetings were expected to continue today, he said.
PASIPY called the strike in order to hold a general assembly of all members tomorrow so the pilots could take a decision on how to press for their demand that the airline return to their collective agreement.
The agreement was frozen under the loss-making airline’s restructuring plan, and CY says it’s too soon to go back to the agreements because the airline has not yet returned to profitability. PASIPY disputes this version.
Kyriacou said yesterday that even if the strike was called off by Saturday, the airline would stick to the new schedule it has announced for the affected flights. It would be to confusing for passengers if CY reverted to the original flight times, he said.
More worrying, he said, was the amount of cancellations by passengers who had booked for July and August, worried that further strike action might follow after Saturday’s pilots’ meeting.
“From the moment they announced a strike, the damage to the company was already done,” said Kyriacou. “There are a lot of cancellations and people began booking with other airlines. This is a very negative development. July and August are the most important months in terms of revenue for the company. We are talking costs of hundreds of thousands of pounds.”
Mediation is likely to be difficult as each side is determined not to back down.
CY reiterated in a statement yesterday that the airline was not in a position to return to the collective agreements. The deal with pilots, it said, was that collective agreements would be frozen for five years, or until the company showed a profit for two consecutive years.
CY is still forecasting losses for 2007.
PASIPY says the pilots had not accepted the restructuring plan and that there was no deal to adhere to. The say the airline is wasting money on bad decisions and then cutting the salaries of employees without doing anything to increase revenue.
Over 2,000 passengers on 12 flights to and from six destinations will be affected in the five-hour strike tomorrow. The airline’s contingency plan during the 10am to 3pm strike programmes some of the flights earlier and the remainder later in the day.
Flights to Paris, Manchester and London will leave one to one and a half hours earlier and those to Athens, Salonica and Zurich some two to three hours later than planned.
The strike was yesterday condemned by hoteliers and the Cyprus Tourism Organisation for the damage it would do to the island’s tourism.
