Households and shops across Greece will be paralyzed with electricity cuts as the labour union GENOP of the electricity company DEH launches repeated 48-hours strikes as of midnight June 19/20. The strikes will have direct impact on everyday life as the company management will apply electricity cuts lasting several hours in order to avoid the total black out. DEH appeals to customers to decrease electricity consumption 12-3 pm and 8-10 pm. The strike will continue until the vote of the Mid-Term Austerity Package, which will most likely be end of June/beginning of July.
Greece’s most powerful labour union opposes the privatization of the state-run Electricity Company. The decision for strike became definite after talks between GENOP and newly appointed Environment Minister George Papaconstantinou failed earlier on Sunday. GENOP’s talks with new Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos turned fruitless on Saturday as well. DEH tops the list of state-run companies that will be privatized.
Everyone who has already experienced previous GENOP-strikes is upset and most of all restaurants, supermarkets, kiosks, pharmacies, private doctor offices, dentists, all in all every one dealing with ‘sensitive’ items.
Not to mention the impact on minors and elderly due to the impossibility of working A/C and fans and thus in times of rising temperatures.
Kiosk owners are threatening to seek legal measures against GENOP and file a law suit.
DEH is supposedly to publish the areas and the hours of the electricity cuts, on its website. Go HERE for Greek and HERE for English. Chose the desired <prefecture> and <municipality>. The site is only in Greek. There is normally a daily update.
PS Believe me, these repeated electricity cuts get really on one’s nerves. If you see no much updates on KTG, it should be easy to guess the reason behind the problem… Thank God, I don’t use the elevator…
I hope they will there will be a civil mobilization for these guys by tomorrow morning and a court that will slam them with huge personal fines.
My business is totally dependend on electricity. I have several computers running at any given time. And was planning to print some huge panorama’s this week for a client and for a festival later this month. Have you ever seen a 2 meter long panorama stuck in a printer halfway through? Does anybody knows how much money lost that would be? So I better not do that. Or better, place the orders in a country where there are normal people working at their local DEI and spent my money in those countries in stead of here in Greece…
Ok, it must be clear that I have went through these kind of strikes before and know the total devestation it brings. And if one of those boys and girls would now ring at my door, I would gladly let my German Shepherd do some shaking with them… Sorry for the rant… 🙁
By the way: at http://www.dei.com.gr/outages/public/scheduling.aspx?lang=2 we have the English version of the website.
oh, they have English? thanks! I didn’t see it last night.
Yes, they have. Little icon left down the page. But the REAL powercuts are only on the Press Release page. And they give them only as pdf in Greek!
Glad to see that they have not really changed into a modern company. 🙁