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Victoria Mindova

Athens is again at risk to become a city dump, after the cleaning staff announced a 48-hour strike from next Monday. The employees demand the government to freeze the dismissal of civil contract employees in the sector for three years and not to proceed with the reduction of their monthly remuneration. The government, on the other hand, is like a student partygoer on the verge of the state exam, who wants to cover for twenty-four hours the reading for four years.

Therefore, the government is quick to pass the laws on the unified list of the public sector wages, which will enforce the new and expected lower wages and the cuts of employees in public and municipal administration. However, none of this is of the cleaning staff concern. According to them, they receive low wages for the nature and volume of their work and they have been working with significantly reduced staff for several years.

Currently, about five million people are living in Athens and 2,000 employees are responsible for the city cleaning. Of these 700 people have signed civil contracts with the municipality and do not have the status of permanent employees like their colleagues. With the new changes in the law on public administration and civil servants, the civil contracts will not be renewed. Moreover, additional cuts in the salaries of all employees in the public sector and local government organizations are planned. This will inevitably affect the cleaning staff.

 "Under the plan for waste management in urban areas, about 3,200 employees in the relevant sector should service Athens in order to comply with the requirements for the hygiene of the capital," said exclusive for GRReporter the Chief Secretary of the Union of cleaning staff in Athens, Dimitris Andonos.  He also explained: "As you can see, we have been working for years with cut staff to meet the needs of the City Hall. If they do not renew the civil contracts of 700 employees, the rest will have to work day and night and they still will not get the job done. They already fired 220 employees in mid-August."

The government solution for this is the law on commissioning cleaning services to private enterprises. In this way, it will not have to pay salaries and supplies from the state funds, but will pay private companies to clean up neighbourhoods and communities. The cleaning staff is against the peculiar "opening" of their profession to private companies, arguing that the municipality already avails properly trained employees and proper equipment to do the work and it should not be commissioned to third parties or companies, which could cost more. "We are experienced and work well. An example of this is that after the last major riots in Athens in late June, our employees and equipment cleared Syntagma Square and the surrounding area for four hours. "

Dimitris Andonos stressed that all citizens in the capital pay the garbage fee and the lack of funds could not be an excuse for the layoffs. He insisted that cleaning staff is needed and it is not possible to place the employees in the category of employees in public enterprises for closure because the need to maintain hygiene in urban areas is a matter of public importance. Moreover, their work has a high degree of occupational diseases and injuries, and according to him, the government should talk about salary increases, not cuts and layoffs. The Athens Mayor George Kaminis supports the request to prevent further job losses in the city cleaning sector. The beginning of the strike is at 12 pm on Sunday, September 11 this year and it is not clear when it will end.