EUROCYPRIA (ECA) workers yesterday marched on the presidential palace demanding they be transferred to Cyprus Airways (CY) when their airline terminates its operations later this month.
The ECA staff decided to go on an indefinite strike on Wednesday after it emerged that the company would be shutting down, apparently leaving them in limbo.
The striking employees, who held banners accusing the government of abandoning them, blocked the entrance to the palace, forcing a Syrian delegation on an official visit with their president to go through the back exit.
The protesters moved some 15 minutes before the arrival of Syrian President Bassar Al-Assad after handing the undersecretary to the president a memo with their demands.
The 320 workers ask the government to honour the assurances given to them by Finance Minister Charilaos Stavrakis, on two occasions, for them to be transferred to CY.
They also want a “voluntary retirement plan for ECA and CY personnel and give the chance to people who want to leave the company to do so.”
The protesters then marched to the finance ministry where two of them chained themselves to a column.
A delegation met the ministry’s permanent secretary who was given a memo with their positions.
After a brief stop at the labour ministry, where they handed their memo to Minister Sotiroulla Charalambous, the ECA staff ended up in parliament where they met House President, Marios Garoyian.
“Today, due to the wrong handling of the company’s previous managements, ECA has been led one step before destruction,” their representative Andreas Kalos told Garoyian. “The people here today are not to blame; they always worked for the good of the company and unfortunately the wrong management, omissions and mistakes brought us to this point.”
Garoyian said the decisions that will be taken should minimise the repercussions on the workers.
“Each worker has a family, has obligations and they cannot find themselves on the street from one day to the other,” Garoyian said.
The strike disrupted the company’s flight schedule, with CY scrambling to service the passengers who were left stranded.
An estimated 15,000 tourists are expected to be affected by the strike and the closure of the company.
CY spokesman Kyriacos Kyriacou said the airline has been covering ECA flights since Wednesday night.
Kyriacou said today would be a difficult day as ECA has a particularly heavy flight schedule with seven flights to and from various European destinations.
“We have done a preliminary readjustment of our flight schedule with the aim of undertaking the specific flights with our aircraft,” Kyriacou said.
He added that where CY could not respond, they made arrangements by renting other aircraft.
