The honeymoon period between the government and the unions appears to be over. It lasted 11 months during which the main union demands about increasing CoLA and raising of the minimum wage were satisfied, but then reality set in and the government decided the time had come to throw off the union shackles.

The semi-dictatorship of the proletariat which unions had hoped the people-pleasing Christodoulides government would impose, it became apparent, was not good for the economy. And it has been proven time and again that economies run by unions, which impose restrictions on the workings of the market, do not prosper because they lose their competitiveness and dynamic.

It has probably dawned on President Christodoulides that businesses are the driving force of a dynamic economy and not unions. Union bosses are not happy with this change, of course, and on Thursday gave a news conference to express their discontent about the president’s promise to businesses to facilitate the arrival of third country workers and to speed up the processing of applications.

All this would be done without ‘social dialogue’, without use of the collective agreements and the protection of local workers or safeguards against unfair competition among businesses, complained the bosses of Peo, Sek and Deok. They also threatened strike action in the two big sectors – hotels and construction – in the near future, if they were not listened to.

The union bosses want to be consulted before applications for foreign workers are approved – this is what is meant by social dialogue – and have the right to turn them down if a business does not have collective agreements in place. Sek boss Andreas Matsas turned the government’s rhetoric against it, accusing it of “replacing the people-centric approach with the serving of employer, and possibly other, expediencies and interest.”

This is all about control, rather than any real concern about the third country workers. Union bosses, who had been pandered to by the government until recently, now feel they are being sidelined and will not be able to extract more concessions from businesses by having a say over applications for foreign workers. They even resort to bogus arguments that Cypriots would be deprived of job opportunities, when they know very well that most of the hirings are for unskilled work in anti-social hours, which locals refuse to do.

Labour Minister Yiannis Panayiotou had recently said that the local workforce cannot cover all the country’s job needs. There would still be about 150,000 vacancies if all locals were in work, said Panayiotou, explaining that the only solution was importing foreign workers. He said on Friday there were laws like the minimum wage protecting foreign workers. Most importantly, the tourist season cannot begin in two months without hotels having adequate staffing levels, because unions want to slow down the processing of applications, in the name of ‘social dialogue’.