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Unemployment has risen to a record 24,000 and scaremongering union leaders have resorted to tactics that fall just shy of racist as they also choose to avoid the issue of overly paid and benefit-laden civil servants.
This is a dangerous game that some politicians have been duped into believing, usually stoked by vote-yielding trade unionists who have no idea about the free economy that we aspire to becoming some day, if we truly want Cyprus to be a centre of excellence for financial, medical, education and shipping services.
Cyprus has free enterprise regulations for hiring in the private sector, but with communist-era rigid contracts when it comes to civil servants whose output and reward is never measured by means of productivity.
Lack of planning and years of pay-hike demands brought us to this stage of no return where major enterprises are obliged to hire foreign workers because they cannot afford anything from the local pool as everybody wants to become a civil servant for life. There’s no doubt that the financial crisis and the subsequent blow to the island’s tourism and construction sectors have had a major impact on the labour market, but some of the registered unemployed are seasonal and prefer to work in the tourism and hotels sectors for six months and get unemployment and other benefits for the rest of the year.
Labour leaders now want to clamp down on foreign students who are enrolled in hospitality courses at the local colleges, as if they are the ones to blame for the rising unemployment. This discriminatory attitude has reached illogical levels as the survival of the colleges relies on their students finding work in the local market in order to gain experience and attract fresh waves of students to come to Cyprus for their studies.
Hiring East Europeans in the construction sector is nothing new. Local workers are not as many as we thought because most of the developers have been hiring from abroad for work that Cypriots no longer want to do. Further down the chain, the work that eastern European workers frown upon is carried out by cheap Asian, Middle Eastern or African labour.
There is nothing shameful in doing any decent work as long as it puts bread on the table and helps pay off mounting debts. Trade unions have not realised that their pay-hike insistence over the years has resulted in the ‘Cypriot worker’ becoming a rare species in the eyes of the employers and contractors, while the civil servants’ mighty Pasidy union has warned the government not even to consider any talk of a pay-freeze. It’s a shame that no administration in Cyprus has ever dared challenge the civil servants to a pay-cut for fear of losing public support.
It’s about time the privileged public sector workers got a taste of their own medicine with rewards linked to their poor service, while those deserving few civil servants who actually do some work reap the benefits of bonuses and promotion opportunities.
