Workers at urban and intercity KTEL services will stage a 24-hour strike tomorrow, Tuesday 3 November, demanding a new sectoral collective labour agreement, pay rises and more staff through permanent hires.
In a statement, the Federation of Transport Unions of Greece (OSME), which represents KTEL workers across all occupations, said a new collective labour agreement should fairly regulate pay and working conditions for all staff at the country’s urban and intercity KTEL services. Workers’ pay has been “frozen” for 17 years, it said, adding that the immediate recruitment of staff, as it called for, would halt the erosion of their profession.
“Workers in the KTEL sector face an entrenched situation of unprecedented employer abuses, arbitrary practices and intransigence,” the statement said.
The strike coincides with the hearing of the Federation’s appeal at the Athens Court of Appeal, in which OSME is seeking to overturn Decision No. 8/2026 of the five-member Arbitration Committee of the Organization for Mediation and Arbitration (OMED).
As the workers put it, private urban and intercity KTEL companies “are exploiting the country’s public transport service under the longstanding protection of successive governments, showing no respect for the hard work of thousands of employees and unwilling to give up even the smallest slice of the pie they have enjoyed for nearly eighty (80) years,” they said in a statement.
OSME said the five-member Arbitration Committee “overturned the May 2026 first-instance ruling of the three-member Arbitration Committee, which provided for minimal increases and rejected our appeal as supposedly ‘inadmissible’, leaving hundreds of workers without any meaningful pay or institutional safeguards,” the workers said, among other things, calling on colleagues to join their nationwide strike in large numbers.
SOURCE: AMNA