AllĀ flights to and from Greece will be grounded for about four hours on Thursday. The air traffic controllers will join the general strike of the public and the private sector against the austerity measures taken by the Greek government. In order to protest against the controversial pension reform and to demand payment of overtime, all the flights will be grounded between 8:00 a.m and 12:00 p.m. “We gave the Government a deadline to deal with our issues. The deadline expired on June 30”, underlined Yiannis Kourmoulakis, general secretary of the air traffic controllers union, on Tuesday. “We haven’t been paid overtime work since February.”
On July 8 all the Greek unions will go on a 24-hour strike. They are going to protest against the recent parliamentary vote on the pension reform, which raises the retirement age and at the same time it curbs early retirement. Olympic Airlines said that they cancelled 28 return flights to popular destinations like Mykonos and Santorini and rescheduled 23 flights to destinations like Paris, London or even Rome. Aegean airlines, cancelled six domestic round flights and they may reschedule another 22. According to the air traffic controllers, they will go on a 24-hour strike on July 14.
Tourism is a domain that these days can be considered as “couch potato” for Greece. It has been hit by a series of strikes and even violent ones. It is time for this sector to be hurt as well!
(source: Reuters Africa)
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