Union stages 24-hour strike demanding the signing of collective working agreements, higher wages and more staff.
Athens Newspaper Distribution Agencies’ Staff Association has gone on strike, demanding the signing of collective working agreements, wage increases, the hiring of new staff and the end of payment delays.
The Association decided to call a 24-hour strike starting April 4. The workers went on strike earlier, on February 28. For more than a year, the association has been negotiating with the press and book distribution agency Argos to sign collective working agreements.
“We claim what is necessary for a dignified life,” the union said.
“Why do we not accept to work without collective working agreements, with small wages that have remained the same for 13 years? … We do not accept to fight every time the electricity bill comes, which we have to pay, the rent or our child’s tuition, so that the profits of the businesses are not affected,” said the Association.
As a result, daily newspapers and magazines distributed every Friday were not published that day.
The Board of Directors of the Journalists’ Union of Athens Daily Newspaper, ESIEA, expressed support for the union.
“Their demands for collective working agreements, decent wages and humane working conditions are common to ours. We call on employers to abandon their intransigent attitude and come to collective bargaining in good faith so that the press industry can finally get collective agreements after many years,” ESIA said in a published statement.
Argos was founded in 1998 and is Greece’s only printed press distribution agency. Its distribution network consists of 105 representatives and it daily reaches at least 4,500 points of sale nationwide.
The Greek Competition Commission launched an investigation from 2017 to 2021] into Argos after some media filed a complaint against it. The report, published in September 2023, said Argos had applied abusive exclusionary practices. The Competition Commission imposed a fine of 750,656,06 euros on it.
Argos announced that it would appeal.
“Argos respects the institutional role of the Competition Commission; however, it will immediately appeal to administrative justice to prove the error of the Commission’s judgment,” it said.
It said the judgment failed “to take into account the specificities of the printed press market and the rules that the agency must adopt to be able, despite adversity, to effectively distribute newspapers and magazines 360 days/year to 4,300 sales points. and in the most remote village of the [national] Territory.”
