COMMON sense prevailed, temporarily, at Larnaca airport where air traffic controllers were threatening to go on strike in protest against the authorities’ insistence that they went through metal detector archways when they went to work. Their union representatives decided to give the communications minister a grace period to study the issue and come up with a solution.
Needless to say, if her proposal is not satisfactory, staff say they will carry out their strike threat which would close down Larnaca airport and cause complete chaos.
Workers in the airport control tower – controllers, Met Services’ staff and CyTA technicians – claim their health is at risk from daily exposure to the magnetic waves emitted by the archways, and want to be exempted from walking through them.
Unions refuse to accept the accuracy of the measurements carried out on the archways, showing that the radiation levels were a thousand times lower than the maximum levels stipulated by international regulations. The workers claimed that past measurements had not been made with proper equipment, which was why the communications minister ordered a repeat exercise by the University of Cyprus last Friday. However, no union representative was present, which means that the results could again be challenged as inaccurate.
Workers have suggested that they undergo a body search instead, as happens in other EU countries, but this would not only be time-consuming – if done properly – but it would set a bad precedent. What if other staff, working at the airport, demanded the same treatment? An army of policemen would be required to be present to body search everyone before they started work.
Interestingly, one press report suggested that some people working at the airport, such as policemen and firemen, do not go through the metal detector archway. If this is true, and not just misinformation by the union, it is an unacceptable breach of security, which must be remedied immediately. If policemen and firemen are exempted from security checks why shouldn’t the staff who work in the control tower.
There cannot be different security rules for different employees. All must be subject to the same security checks before entering the airport’s security-regulated zone. Once this is ensured, and it is scientifically proven that the radiation from the archways is harmless, control-tower staff would not be able to make a rational case. Of course rationality does not always feature in union positions, which is why the communications minister would be making a big error if she eventually decided to give the control tower staff different treatment.
It is true that we cannot afford a strike that would stop all flights, but can we afford to give in to every group of workers which threatens to go on strike over trivialities?
