Workers at public broadcaster CyBC are to strike on Wednesday, demanding a resolution to issues related to the payment of pensions.

It was not immediately clear what programmes will be affected.

Three trade unions are backing the strike, saying they will “come back dynamically until the final resolution of the issue, demanding the obvious: that no worker be wronged”.

The dispute arises from CyBC’s apparent refusal to pay workers and retirees pensions to which they are entitled for more than two years, with the unions saying the workers “cannot tolerate this mockery”.

As such, they called on the government to “make the necessary decisions so that the issue is finally resolved, and the obvious is finally achieved, with the full payment of pension benefits for workers who have either retired or will retire in the future”.

“We expect all those involved to rise to the occasion, and especially [President Nikos Christodoulides] himself to ensure that the issue is finally resolved, as he has publicly committed to doing so for months,” he said.

If the issue is not resolved, they said, “measures will continue on a periodic basis and will be further escalated until the state addresses the issue and resolves it definitively”.

According to the unions, the issue of pensions relates to a lack of pre-2003 salary records for many permanent CyBC employees, meaning that the amount payable as their pensions are calculated incorrectly.

Some partial payments have been made to retirees since 2023, but these payments did not account for years of service before 2003.

The unions had as such proposed a methodology to calculate pre-2003 salary payments with the aid of an actuarial firm, with the aim of calculating what workers’ salaries would have been and thus correctly paying pensions.

However, accountant-general Andreas Antoniades had said the figures calculated by the actuarial firm could not be accepted, as the methodology “does not reflect actual salaries but theoretical figures”.

This, he said, makes it “incompatible” with the law.