Striking Metro Workers Refuse Return Order

The head of the Athens Metro workers union, Antonis Stamatopoulos, whose members have been on strike for eight days over pay cuts, shutting down the system, said his members wouldn’t come back to work and defied the government to jail or fire them if they refused. “Over our dead bodies,” he told SKAI radio about the edict.
Manthos Tsakos, General Secretary of the union, said, “It’s not that Metro workers went crazy over the last eight days. We exhausted every possibility before going on strike. We’ve reached our limits. We’ve run out of patience,” according to the newspaper Kathimerini.
After an emergency four-hour meeting with Prime Minister Antonis Samaras on Jan. 24, Development Minister Costis Hatzidakis said the Greek government would issue civil mobilization orders to make Athens metro staff return to their jobs.
Hatzidakis, who is responsible for transport and has confronted the workers leaders before in angry battles, said, “Unionists have decided to take the path of blind confrontation and not to respect the decisions of Greek justice.”
He said the government was left with no other option because the strike – which is spreading to the bus, train, tram and trolley systems – is shutting down public transportation and nearly immobilizing the center of Athens.
The prospect measure of civil mobilization – used against seamen, truckers and street cleaners in 2010 and 2011 – means that employees will have to return to work or face the prospect of going directly to jail. There was no immediate reaction from the union, which has been defying a court order to return to work for days.
Earlier, worker representatives said they would suspend their action if the government committed to maintaining the collective labor agreement, which expires on April 30, before negotiating a new deal. Workers are objecting to a reduction in their salaries that has resulted from their induction into a new civil service wage structure and they want to be exempted from more pay cuts being imposed on other civil servants except for Parliament workers.