Hospital cleaners to stage protest on Monday

Cleaners working on fixed-term contracts at Athens’s Dromokaiteio Psychiatric Hospital and the Aghios Savvas General Hospital are staging a protest outside the Health Ministry in the city center at 8.30 a.m. Monday.

The cleaners, whose action has the support of the POEDIN union of public hospital workers, are protesting the expiry of their contracts and the prospect of unemployment.

According to POEDIN, the government has rejected demands for their contracts to be extended so that it can call a new competition for the vacant positions as part of its pre-election strategy to muster votes.

“The plan is for job openings to be announced at regular intervals for each hospital so that thousands of candidates apply in the pre-election period, thus cultivating false hopes of jobs in the civil service,” POEDIN said.