CYPRUS Airways’ (CY) biggest union yesterday called a 24-hour strike for next Wednesday and threatened to escalate the measures on December 17 and 18, the height of the holiday season.
If the strike goes ahead it will cause untold misery to thousands of Christmas travellers and push the airline further into financial ruin, CY said in a statement.
The airline said it had learned of the strike after the union, CYNIKA, which has pilots and cabin crew as members, sent notice to the Labour Ministry.
It called the strike inexcusable and unethical. “This action pushes an already troubled airline which is making a last ditch attempt to survive over the edge,” a CY statement said.
Not only that, but to choose the Christmas holiday season to stage a strike was totally unacceptable, the statement added.
CY spokesman Kyriacos Kyriacou said in addition to its regular passengers from Greece and the UK, the airline had begun its new programme to take passengers from third countries who wanted to visit Mecca.
The airline has laid on 42 extra flights between December and January, that were to carry as many as 13,000 European Muslims transiting through Cyprus to Saudi Arabia. The extra flights started on December 2.
CYNIKA chief Andreas Pierides told the Cyprus Mail the union did not want to stage a strike. “But they have given us no option,” he said.
“We have been in talks with the Ministry of Labour since October 3 and yesterday (Tuesday) we told them we were not going to agree to the proposal they put to us.”
The Union has been up in arms over CY’s plans to outsource ground handling services at the airports to Swissport & GAP Vassilopoulos. The national carrier insists no jobs will be lost, while it will enable the airline to carry out the services more cost effectively.
The company says it could save nearly £2 million a year. Around 140 employees are would be affected by the shift but CY says their jobs and benefits would not be endangered.
However staff fear they would no longer be CY employees but merely employees of the joint venture company.
“From the first paragraph of the proposal they gave us it says these 140 people will not be employees of Cyprus Airways as of May 1, 2008,” Pierides said. “This is a red line for us”.
Under the proposed joint venture, CY would hold over 25 per cent of shares, giving it a strong input in decision-making, should they win the contract being tendered by airport operator Hermes, which has pledged to open ground handling services to competition by next April.
At the moment, CY only performs about 20-25 per cent of the total work they hope to be doing with Swissport, assuming the venture wins one of the two licences being offered by Hermes.
Pierides said if CY wanted the strike cancelled, they knew what they had to do to prevent it.
“It’s very easy to avoid,” said Pierides. “Staff of this airline have made untold sacrifices under the restructuring plan, but we have no other option. We have been employees of Cyprus Airways for so many years and we gave 10-15 per cent of our salaries to save the company in the last four years. If we are not, like they say, going to lose out, why not allow us the benefit of still being considered Cyprus Airways employees.”
The union threatened to call a similar strike at the beginning of November over the same issue but it was averted at the last minute when CYNIKA decided to sit down and discuss the issues.
CY’s Kyriacou urged the airline’s Christmas travellers not to panic. ‘We still have some time to sort this out,” he said.
