For the second time in less than two weeks, the Greek government invoked emergency laws to order strikers back, ordering striking seamen to end a six-day strike that has kept ships in port and caused supply shortages o the Greek islands.
As he did against Metro workers who shut down the subway system last month for nine days, Prime Minister Antonis Samaras issued a civil mobilization order that means the seamen can be jailed or fired if they refuse to go back to work.
The workers haven’t been paid for six months and they were also protesting pending reforms that could lead to many of them being laid off or fired. Merchant Marine Minister Costas Mousouroulis said the government did what it could to find a way to eventually pay them but the government didn’t back down on plans to change work contracts requiring far few workers on ships during the winter months.
“Unfortunately, arteriosclerotic and petty political views prevailed, not allowing (the end of the strike) so that our islands could regain their only means of communication with each other and the mainland,” Mousouroulis said in a statement.
The ferry strike has already had an impact on islanders, many of whom rely on the mainland for basic everyday supplies. An island trade and commerce association warned that the seamen’s walkout poses a substantial threat to small businesses on islands for whom ships are often the only means of getting supplies.
The Associated Press reported that The Cyclades Chamber of Commerce, representing one of the bigger island chains, said that the strike had led to shortages in goods, prevented treatment of serious health cases and even stopped the transportation of dead bodies for burial. “We demand that you understand, and this is no overstatement, that the limits of what we can bear and tolerate have been exceeded,” the statement said.
In a separate statement, the country’s national trade federation warned that the strike had left large numbers of trucks loaded with goods trapped in the country’s main ports. The civil mobilization law, amended in 2007 to deal with “peacetime emergencies,” has now been used 10 times since the 1974 collapse of a military dictatorship in Greece — three of those in anti-austerity strikes over the past two years.
Greek unions and workers have been protesting for nearly three years against pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions imposed by successive governments on the order of international lenders who want to make sure investors and banks get paid back first. That has worsened the country’s recession, now in its sixth year, and created a record 26.8 percent unemployment.
Farmers are also protesting changes in tax laws, threatening to block highways across the country, while state media have been on strike for the past two days, shutting down some news programs and other offerings.
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