A more than week-long garbage strike will apparently continue in Greece, as even a meeting chaired by the country’s prime minister on Tuesday failed to break a deadlock in talks between the relevant interior ministry and a union representing sanitation workers.
Under Greece’s utterly centralized system, the ministry has the final say on hirings and terms of employment for sanitation workers paid by municipalities, including people hired on a specific-term contract basis.
The latter is the reason behind the strike, as the union (POE-OTA) demands that workers whose contracts expired be rehired as full-time tenured staff by the respective municipalities where they work.
The only consolation on the part of the union on Tuesday was a pledge to field more skeletons crews amid the first and ongoing heat wave of the summer season.
Beyond blocking the collection of rubbish from overflowing trash bins around the country, the union is also preventing garbage trucks from exiting garages and blocking landfills.
On the legislative front, a draft amendment envisioning a future process for selection of full-time sanitation workers, which was tacked on as a rider to an unrelated bill by the interior ministry, was passed by a majority of MPs in Parliament earlier in the day, but without opposition support.
The garbage strike itself reignited debate in the country over allowing private contractors to handle garbage collection and disposal, something the current leftist coalition government has repeatedly vowed to prevent.
Nevertheless, in the northern metropolis of Thessaloniki this week’s threats by Mayor Yannis Boutaris to directly award short-term contracts for waste management led the local union chapter to allow 10 trucks on the city’s streets on Monday. Another 27 garbage trucks were working on Tuesday.
Despite the partial let-up, the president of Thessaloniki prefecture’s local government employees union, Cleopatra Horozidi, was succinct in comments to reporters, “we won’t allow private contractors in (the sector)”.
That position echoed statements by several government ministers, who have claimed that allowing private contractors to assume garbage collection will mean "galley-like" conditions for workers and even increase costs.
