Greece’s president Karolos Papoulias has now called for an end to the strikes that are currently closing Athens’s Acropolis to visitors. Whilst there is sympathy for the strikers, their actions have the potential to cause major damage to the Greece’s tourist trade.

From:
Associated Press

Greece: Strikers close Acropolis for back pay
1 day ago

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Striking Culture Ministry employees closed the Acropolis to visitors Wednesday for the fifth time in two weeks, turning hundreds of tourists away from the ancient site.

The protesters are mostly contract workers demanding permanent jobs and back pay. Hundreds of visitors stood outside the entrance as strikers handed out fliers detailing their demands.

American tourist Kelly Scherer said she made the trip to Athens specifically to visit the Acropolis.

“I am unimaginably disappointed,” said the 21-year-old from Connecticut. “The Acropolis is why you come to Athens. We rearranged our whole schedule to come here.”

The protest went ahead despite a promise Tuesday from the Culture Ministry to address the strikers’ demands. Protesters said they were skeptical of the government’s statement.

“There are people who haven’t been paid since November,” said Yiannis Nakas, an archaeologist contracted by the Culture Ministry.

From:
Associated Press

Greece’s president urges striking workers to open Acropolis to visitors
By TOM STOUKAS Associated Press
9:41 AM CDT, March 11, 2009

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece’s president urged striking Culture Ministry employees Wednesday to end a protest that has closed the Acropolis to visitors for the fifth time in two weeks.

The protesters are mostly contract workers demanding permanent jobs and back pay.

President Karolos Papoulias said the strikers should chose a different form of protest.

“I completely understand the demands and protests made by the contract workers. But for me it is inconceivable for the Sacred Rock of the Acropolis to be closed off,” Papoulias said.

“There are ways to protest other than closing off a world heritage site.”

Hundreds of tourists were turned away from the site Wednesday. Many stood at the entrance as strikers handed out fliers detailing their demands and displayed handwritten banners apologizing for the closure.

American tourist Kelly Scherer said she come to Athens specifically to see the Acropolis.

“I am unimaginably disappointed,” said the 21-year-old from Connecticut. “The Acropolis is why you come to Athens. We rearranged our whole schedule to come here.”

The protest went ahead despite a promise Tuesday from the Culture Ministry to address the strikers’ demands. Protesters said they were skeptical of the government’s statement.

“There are people who haven’t been paid since November,” said Yiannis Nakas, an archaeologist contracted by the Culture Ministry.

Nakas said the blockade could be repeated Thursday unless the government strengthened its commitment to resolve the pay dispute.

The Culture Ministry on Wednesday said it had already promised to introduce a measure in Parliament to assist contract workers and strongly condemned the ongoing protest.

“A small minority of contract workers is pretending it has not heard the commitments made by the government and ignored the huge national cost of their own (actions),” a ministry statement said.

From:
Agence France Presse

Greece banks on tourism as crisis stings
March 11, 2009
2 days ago

ATHENS (AFP) — In the grip of a burgeoning economic crisis that has soured global travel forecasts, the last thing tourist-hungry Greece needed was a blockade of the Acropolis, its main archaeological attraction.

But amid an early slump in bookings that alarms the country’s key industry, thousands of visitors have been turned away at the gates of this city’s ancient citadel because of a protest by culture ministry staff.

Thousands have been prevented in the last fortnight from accessing the iconic temple, which draws crowds over 100,000 people each month, in a protest against layoffs that is set to continue in mid-March.

The timing is unfortunate for Greece, which in December went through weeks of street violence after the fatal shooting of a teenager by police.

At the time, tourism leaders noted that a locked-up Acropolis was more damaging that the mainly anti-police unrest in which no tourists were harmed.

Today, the damage from December is hard to assess but the figures coming in are not pleasant, operators say.

“The violence, along with exaggerated media reports, dented Greece’s image,” says George Drakopoulos, general manager of the association of Greek tourism enterprises (Sete).

“But the measure of harm is hard to gauge right now as we lack arrival results over the entire year to compare to last year’s,” he adds.

Current booking figures are cold comfort, particularly from the British and German markets that traditionally make up most of Greece’s foreign arrivals.

“Right now we have 30 percent fewer bookings from Britain and 20 percent from Germany compared to this time last year,” says Argyro Fili, head of the Hellenic association of travel and tourist agencies (Hatta).

No precise figures are currently available for the US market but the fall there is believed to be similar, she added.

“The game has switched to late booking … everybody is waiting to see what happens,” Fili said.

“We expect to have a clear picture by early April.”

In another discouraging sign, the Greek statistics service Esye last month reported a 3.2-percent drop in arrivals in the first nine months of 2008 compared to the equivalent period in 2007.

The agency also reported a 3.9-percent fall in hotel and camping arrivals.

A study released in February by EFG Eurobank, Greece’s third-largest lender, warned that the country’s tourist arrivals were threatened with the largest drop in nearly 20 years by the global pinch on income.

Recession and economic slowdown in OECD countries — which include the main Western economies — traditionally either coincide or are followed by “tangible” falls in tourist arrivals in Greece, the study said.

“The fall in travel expenditure by foreigners in our country could be worth at least two billion euros (2.5 billion dollars) in 2009 if negative forecasts prove right,” the study said.

In a bid to tackle the problem head-on, Greek Tourism Minister Costas Markopoulos last week said he would tour six US states to promote the country in coming weeks.

“There is a good chance that the falling trend in tourism traffic expected in the first three months of 2009 can be reversed in the second trimester,” the minister said in London last week.

Markopoulos is Greece’s third tourism minister in two years and the fourth since 2004, a sign that the government ought to take the sector’s long-term planning a bit more seriously, operators note.

The country’s biggest source of income after shipping, tourism makes up 18 percent of the Greek economy and employs over 850,000 people directly or indirectly according to the tourism ministry.

Tourism proceeds in 2007 earned the Greek economy over 11.4 billion euros according to the Bank of Greece.

Over 17 million people visited the country during that year according to the Greek statistics service, a total that includes many immigrants from neighbouring Albania and Bulgaria.

From:
Bloomberg

Greece’s President Calls Acropolis Blockade ‘Inconceivable’
By Natalie Weeks
March 11 (Bloomberg)

Greek President Karolos Papoulias called the blockade of Greece’s most visited tourist site “inconceivable’ after Culture Ministry contract workers shut the Acropolis demanding permanent jobs and blocking hundreds of tourists from entering.

Dozens of protestors hung banners around the entrance with the slogan “We want permanent jobs for all employees,” state- run NET television showed. The protest is the second time the site has been shut to visitors in the past two weeks, and comes a day after the ministry said it would meet one of their demands for payment.

“I sympathize with the contractors’ protests and their demands and struggles,” Papoulias said in an e-mailed statement today. “But for me it is inconceivable that the sacred rock of the Acropolis is being blocked in this way,” he said.

The Acropolis, which houses the 2,500-year-old Parthenon temple, attracts around 3,000 ticketed visitors a day, according to a ministry spokeswoman. Tourism accounts for about 17 percent of Greece’s gross domestic product and about one in five jobs, according to estimates by the World Travel and Tourism Council, an industry group.

From:
Kathimerini (English Edition)

Wednesday March 11, 2009 – Archive
In Brief
CONTRACT DISPUTE

Culture Ministry workers due to shut Acropolis again from today

Culture Minister Antonis Samaras said yesterday that an amendment would be tabled in Parliament in the next few days to settle the problem that has seen some 700 contract workers go unpaid for several months but the move is unlikely to prevent more strikes at the Acropolis. The issue is only one of several matters that has led to employees of the Culture Ministry forcing the closure of the Acropolis in recent weeks. Their main demand is that they be made permanent employees. Despite Samaras’s announcement, the contract workers said that they are planning to hold rolling 24-hour strikes from today, which will lead to the Acropolis being shut.

[…]

From:
Kathimerini (English Edition)

Thursday March 12, 2009
NEWS
Country’s main attraction closed, again
ALEXANDROS STAMATIOU/EUROKINISSI

A tourist takes a photograph outside the blocked-off entrance to the Acropolis yesterday as Culture Ministry workers seeking permanent contracts pressed on with protest action. The sign reads: ‘Blockade. Will the minister listen?’ President Karolos Papoulias called for an end to the action. ‘I completely understand (their) demands… but it is inconceivable for the Sacred Rock of the Acropolis to be closed off,’ he said.

From:
Athens News Agency

03/12/2009
Acropolis closed due to strike

Culture Minister employees continued to keep closed on Thursday the archaeological site of the Acropolis, despite an announcement by Culture Minister Antonis Samaras on Tuesday that an amendment resolving the problem of paying contract staff working at the culture ministry on the basis of temporary court orders would be tabled in Parliament within days.

A number of staff at the ministry, who had originally been taken on with temporary contracts and had won temporary court orders allowing them to continue working at the ministry until their case was settled, had found their pay blocked by the Court of Audit after the start of the 2009. This refused to approve ministry payment orders on the grounds that there was no obligation to execute a court decision that was not final, so that staff were essentially working unpaid.