Workers employed in the support programmes of the Ministry of Education, Sport and Youth staged a protest outside the Presidential Palace on Thursday and announced a 24-hour strike, calling for legally binding job security guarantees — even as the government argued it had already delivered on the most significant demands.
At the heart of the dispute is a demand that workers who have completed 30 months of service be converted from fixed-term to indefinite fixed-term status. The two unions — PASEV-PEO and OEKDY-SEK — say the bill currently before the House of Representatives falls short of that guarantee and leaves hundreds of workers in an insecure position.
The unions say the bill ignores court rulings on the workers’ employment status, conflicts with national and EU law, disregards their own recommendations and fails to recognise the workers’ years of contribution to the programmes. In their memorandum to President Nikos Christodoulides, they warned that rather than resolving long-standing problems the bill creates further risks.
Describing the strike as a last resort and an act of responsibility to defend fundamental employment rights, the unions are also calling for the bill to be voted on before parliament is dissolved, full compliance with court decisions, alignment with national and EU law, and the renewal of the collective employment agreement.
The unions’ general secretaries — Giorgos Konstantinou of OEKDY-SEK and Andreas Kounnis of PASEV-PEO — nonetheless acknowledged that the Christodoulides government had already met significant demands: it abolished the service-purchase regime and converted workers to fixed-term employee status. The Ministry of Education subsequently drafted the bill at the unions’ own request and, after adopting several of their recommendations during consultation, resubmitted it to the House under urgent procedure.
Deputy Government Spokesperson Yiannis Antoniou, who received the memorandum on behalf of the President, said the government supports this group of workers in a practical and substantive way — as the workers themselves acknowledge. The matter, he said, is now before the House of Representatives.
