Attica municipalities grind to halt amid worker action
Local authority employees on Friday continued sitins at city halls and municipal buildings across the country to protest a scheme aimed at puttng thousands of them into a fast-track redundancy scheme.
In Attica, all city halls were to remain shut as workers pressed on with their action with a protest rally scheduled to take place outside the Administrative Reform Ministry before noon.
The union representing local authority workers, known by its acronym POE-OTE, was to meet on Friday to decide on how to continue with industrial action.
On Thursday Manitakis issued a statement that appeared to go against the ministry’s declared commitments to the country’s foreign creditors by stating that he would not approve a single layoff, only transfers of civil servants from one department to another. “I will not fire a single civil servant, nor will I put my signature under any decision for dismissal,” Manitakis told Parliament’s public administration committee. He was responding to a question lodged by leftist SYRIZA MP Alexis Mitropoulos about impending civil servant layoffs.
