Cypriot teachers will walk out on Thursday morning in a strike affecting roughly 310,000 students and parents, though the Education Ministry has pledged pupils arriving late won’t be penalised.
Primary and secondary educators will stop work until 9am after both major unions escalated industrial action. The ministry is expected to issue guidance on handling the disruption as parents face the challenge of getting children to school during rush hour.
Students unable to reach schools by 9am—when teachers return to work—won’t be marked absent, according to information obtained by Philenews. Teachers will face salary cuts under existing legislation.
The stoppage affects every educational level after secondary union OELMEK joined primary union POED in taking action. Transport presents a particular headache: school buses cannot alter their routes, leaving parents in remote areas with few options.
Organised parent groups have condemned the strike, accusing teacher unions of using children as bargaining chips.
Loizos Konstantinou, president of the Pan-Cyprian Confederation of Secondary Education Parents, said anger among parents is running high. Speaking on Alpha Kalimera, he revealed unions had considered withholding first-term grades.
“It’s one thing to claim something, to want something for your sector, your profession, your conditions, and another to affect the rights of third parties and in this case, children, and to cause distress to parents,” Konstantinou said.
He warned roughly a third of the island’s population will be on roads at 9am trying to reach schools. Few students from distant areas are expected to make it on time despite ministry efforts to arrange alternatives, he added.
“The Ministry will issue an announcement, because children and parents are not responsible for not being able to get their children to schools,” Konstantinou said.
Union leaders defended the action as a constitutional right exercised only after months of restraint.
OELMEK president Demetris Taliadoros rejected characterisations of the strike as blackmail. “One of the basic teachings is that democracies are not blackmailed,” he told Alpha TV. “In democracies, the worker has the right to strike which must be respected, since it is constitutionally protected.”
POED president Myria Vasiliou said her union has held strike authorisation since June but delayed action for months. “When an educational organisation which sparingly activates the strike measure [does so], this alone should send messages and it should be understood that for us to be forced to reach this, patience was exhausted.”
Teachers will be at their posts by 9:05am to receive students, Vasiliou said, adding that proposed education legislation poses a greater long-term threat to public schools than Thursday’s disruption.
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