Reuters. Trains, ships, planes and public transport halted on Thursday (March 16), as Greek workers walked off the job to protest over the country's deadliest train crash on record which killed 57 people on Feb. 28.
The 24-hour strike called by Greece's largest private and public sector unions also shut some public services and state schools.
It is the latest in a series of protests since the head-on collision of a passenger train with more than 350 people on board, most of them university students, with a freight train in the central Greek region of Tempi, near Larissa. Rail workers have staged rolling strikes since the accident.
Protesters, accusing the conservative government and the country's political system of turning a blind eye to repeated calls by unions over deficient safety measures in the Greek railway, will stage rallies later in the day outside parliament.
“It is about policies of generous privileges and subsidies for shipowners, businessmen, bankers and monopolies and on the other side there are the workers in all the sectors whose rights are constantly under attack, they don’t hesitate to even sacrifice safety for the sake of monopolies,” said head of Greece’s commercial ship engineers union Thanasis Evangelakis.
A judicial probe into the accident has been launched, and the government has vowed to completely modernize and repair train services and systems.
“I don’t believe anything (it says),” said striking sailor Panagiotis Hatzinikoloau of the government. “Did the accident have to happen for it to do something? It is only because elections are coming that it might do some of the things it says, but not all of them.”
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, whose term ends in July and is expected to call elections by May, has apologized over the crash and has promised to hire more staff and fix the ailing rail sector with support from the European Union.
Last week, tens of thousands rallied in Athens and other cities across Greece in the largest street demonstrations the government has faced since being elected in 2019.
