WHITE COLLAR unions have always been extremely powerful in Cyprus, but since President Christofias took office, two years ago, their arrogance and militancy have grown. We have now reached the stage at which talk of the dictatorship of the proletariat can no longer be regarded as a joke or a case of hyperbole. While we still enjoy our democratic rights and freedoms an unhealthy degree of power is now being exercised by a small clique of union bosses, answerable to nobody, not even their members.
This small, unaccountable group has been dictating government policy, with the president unwilling to stand up to it because of his ideological beliefs. A life-time communist, who shamelessly idolises Fidel Castro and the former Soviet Union, cannot go against the wishes of the workers’ leaders. Ruthless union bosses have long identified this presidential weakness and have been exploiting it to the full. They know that all they have to do when there is a disagreement is to brand Christofias ‘anti-worker’ and he immediately falls into line.
Unions now behave as a higher authority, shaping government policy. We all remember how the state teachers union successfully blocked the university’s decision to open up its admissions policy to students from private schools. The same union vetoed government plans to change state school history books and make them less dogmatic; again there was an official retreat and the issue was shelved. The government doctors’ union has been playing a similar role in health policy, imposing its leader’s demand for the establishment of a second oncology centre on the government, which is an irrational use of health resources.
Then there is Labour Minister Sotiroulla Charalambous, a former union official, who supposedly reformed the Social Insurance scheme in order to extend its viability. She avoided the radical reform required such as the across the board extension of retirement age and the lowering of civil servants’ pensions but introduced some half-baked changes sanctioned by the unions. Ms Charalambous does not even hide the fact that she takes instructions from union bosses. A few months ago she publicly said that one of her misguided schemes to combat unemployment would be finalised after she consulted the unions.
Worst of all is that union bosses are now shaping the government’s economic policy as well. The main cause of the widening public deficit is not – apparently – the fact that the number of civil servants has gone up by 52 per cent, their earnings have increased by 445 per cent and their pensions by 961 per cent in 20 years. According to union wisdom, embraced by our cowardly government, the fiscal problems are caused exclusively by tax avoidance and tax evasion. And as the PASYDY union said in a statement on Tuesday, if the state collected its tax dues, it would meet economic targets, without having to touch the public sector payroll.
This diversionary rhetoric has become official policy, the government having already prepared 21 new bills, which give sweeping powers to tax inspectors and are aimed at clamping down on tax evasion. As regards the root cause of all the fiscal problems – public sector wages and pension – nothing has been done. A package of measures prepared by the finance ministry, was publicly disowned by Christofias as soon as PASYDY threatened to take strike action. This week, when the government announced plans to reform child benefit payments and student grants all unions united in threatening dynamic action and the likelihood is that these will also be abandoned.
At least, this was what Christofias, reportedly, indicated at Thursday’s meeting with union bosses, at which he was supposed to discuss ways of reducing public sector costs. We do not know what proposals were presented at the meeting, but the fact that all union bosses expressed their satisfaction on Friday morning did not bode well; neither did the president’s declared intention to secure an agreement by consensus. In Cyprus industrial relations, ‘consensus’ is a euphemism for accepting union diktats.
But how naive is it to think that the PASYDY leadership which has put the state on the path to bankruptcy by turning its members into an ultra-privileged group of workers would now put the interests of the economy above those of its members?
And how frightening is the thought that clueless union bosses, who caused the economy’s biggest problem – lack of competitiveness – are now dictating government economic policy, because our president views the dictatorship of the proletariat as a noble ideal and not as the recipe for economic ruin which it really is?
