Labour Minister Yiannis Panayiotou will hold separate meetings with trade unions and with employers’ associations in the coming days amid an ongoing rift over the cost-of-living allowance (CoLA) which led workers to engage in a three-hour general strike on Thursday.

The Cyprus News Agency reported on Sunday that the meetings will aim to “continue the effort to form convergences and bridge differences” between workers and employers.

The employers’ and industrialists’ federation (Oev) and the Cyprus chamber of commerce and industry (Keve) had both announced earlier in the day that they will meet Panayiotou on Monday.

Thursday’s strike saw the island brought to a standstill, with workers demanding that CoLA be restored in its full, original form, stressing that the allowance preserves workers’ purchasing power, supports living standards and consumption, and helps enforce collective agreements

Public services and public transport were the most affected, with more than 50 flights and 15,000 airline passengers impacted by the strike, while trade unionists across the island took to the streets.

Trade union Peo’s secretary-general Sotiroula Charalambous had on Monday said the strike would be “the first step in a series of measures, until we achieve the goal, which is collective and universal”.

Earlier in the year, former Oev chairman Antonis Antoniou had expressed his distaste for CoLA, saying it “should have disappeared”.

“We believe that it should have disappeared. There are other tools for employees to achieve their progress, but we accept to continue it with some variations, with a modernisation which is consistent with the economic realities of recent decades,” he said.

His views were echoed by Keve chairman Philokypros Rousounides, who also described it at the time as “an anachronistic institution, which needs improvement or replacement with a new mechanism”.