The President of the Republic took the bait on Sunday night. He believed the employers’ leaders when they promised him an “honest compromise”: 100% cost-of-living adjustment (up from today’s 66.7%) for workers already getting COLA, plus those on minimum wage. So not everyone, then.
The catch? The Government would have to bin its own policy framework—the one that promised COLA for All, with some preferential arrangements for existing COLA recipients. Just enough to keep the high-earning civil servants and PASYDY from throwing their toys out of the pram.
The President threw his COLA for All pledge down the toilet—his big promise to the low-paid and the middle class—just to buy himself some peace and avoid industrial action.
And the employers’ reps left the Presidential Palace on Sunday saying they’d go away and get formal sign-off from their organisations on Tuesday.
They didn’t get it. Because, as we wrote in yesterday’s column, handing COLA to the poor sods—white, black, green, yellow—scraping by on minimum wage (if they even get that much) isn’t a straightforward matter for some of the big employers. We said yesterday that COLA for workers on a thousand euros is blindingly obvious to any reasonable person, but utterly unthinkable to certain others.
Well, yesterday, apparently the entire OEV and the entire KEVE decided it was unthinkable to factor in annual COLA for minimum wage earners when there’s inflation and when there’s “growth.”
So they said no to the compromise that President Christodoulides had accepted at their own insistence.
The unions, though, got in first and said yes to the compromise (which leaves armies of low-paid private sector workers high and dry)—and thank God they had the sense to slip into their decision “but not one iota of the government proposal will change.”
When we say not one iota, we mean not a single letter of the alphabet, right?
In short: no more dialogue. Not even over the phone.
And that doesn’t just apply to the unions—it applies to the President too. Who, after Sunday’s humiliating U-turn, fortunately said (whether it slipped out or not, we don’t care) that the dialogue is over. There’s nothing left to discuss.
So here’s where we are: We’ve got a Government that initially said the right and fair thing was for EVERYONE to get COLA if inflation hits 4%, but that those getting COLA for the first time would get 100% of the inflation increase, for salaries up to €2,500. No problem. Easy as you like, right?
Then the employers went berserk, demanding Panagiotou’s head on a platter, and the unions—instead of standing firm on the government policy framework and saying “not one iota will change,” which is what they said yesterday about inferior provisions—the President caved. He agreed to “sell out” those outside the COLA system and keep those inside it happy. Plus minimum wage earners, somewhere around 50-60,000 people—hardly negligible, but not enough.
But the employers said no.
They want more dialogue.
But the President got in first and said “the dialogue is over.”
And the unions said “not one iota changes.”
So what now, Mr. President?
Simple. Send the original COLA policy framework to Parliament as a bill. Restoring the purchasing power of wages during periods of growth and inflation isn’t the concern of employers or unions. It’s the state’s concern. Government and Parliament.
