CYPRUS Airways could be heading for a “big crisis” if pilots decide to escalate strike measures, the airline’s spokesman warned yesterday.
The pilots are striking for five hours today, from 10am to 3pm, during which they will hold a general assembly to discuss the next steps.
The prospect of more strike action over the summer has already prompted cancellations during the airline’s two most lucrative months.
“Everything depends on their decision,” said CY spokesman Kyriacos Kyriacou. “We could be heading for a big crisis if they decide to escalate the measures, and yes we are worried because we don’t know where it will end for the company.”
He said an escalation would leave the airline teetering “on the edge of a cliff”.
Kyriacou said that an attempted intervention by the mediation service of the Labour Ministry on Thursday had failed because the pilots’ union PASIPY refused to back down on its demand that the company restore 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.
CY says the pilots agreed to wait five years, or until the airline had shown two consecutive years of profit, before returning to the collective agreements.
PASIPY disputes this version, saying because they did not accept the plan in the first place, there was no such deal.
They say the airline is wasting money on bad decisions and then cutting the salaries of employees without doing anything to increase revenue.
A CY statement yesterday expressed deep regret that the pilots had decided on this course of action, saying the pilots were not even heeding the reaction of public opinion.
“More deplorable is that they do not seem to realise the damage that their actions will result in and the damage that was caused from the first moment they announced the strike,” said the statement.
It called on the pilots, on the eve of the strike, to act responsibly and put an end to the course of action they have chosen.
There was no way to return to the collective agreements at this point because it would cause the collapse of the company, the statement added.
Over 2,000 passengers on 12 flights to and from six destinations will be affected in the five-hour strike today. The airline’s contingency plan has reprogrammed affected flights. 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.
