Tension ran high at the University of Athens Tuesday, as administrative staff continued a lengthy strike against layoffs and redeployments despite a court ruling that their action was illegal. Ruling in a case launched by Education Minister Costas Arvanitopoulos, a court on Monday declared the ongoing strike at the Athens University and the Athens Polytechnic "illegal and abusive".
While the Polytechnic was expected to re-open its doors after the ruling, employees at the University of Athens - which has about 65,000 students - have decided to stay on strike until the government withdraws its civil service restructuring plans. Crisis-ridden Greece has pledged to axe 4,000 state jobs and redeploy 25,000 civil servants by the end of the year as part of its bailout by the International Monetary Fund and European Union.
Under those plans, 600 administrative employees at the University of Athens - half its staff - are threatened by layoffs or redeployment. Christos Georgiadis, who has been working at the University of Athens geology department for 12 years, said the future of public education was at stake as he joined about 100 of his colleagues to protest in front of the university.
"There is no other solution but to continue our struggle against the dissolution of universities and try to keep them public," the 37-year-old, whose wife is unemployed, told AFP. "They want to abolish our posts and then call on (private) companies to do our job," said Dimitris Theocharis, an administrative employee for 17 years. A total of 1,350 administrative staff from eight universities around the country - 40 percent of the sector - are affected by the restructuring.
The scheme mostly concerns the University of Athens, the only one to continue striking, as other universities reopened their doors one month after the strike began in September. So far, the EU and IMF have committed a total of 240 billion euros in two bailout deals to Greece.
Comments
Comments are closed.