In a meeting held at the Ministry of Labour, Solidarity and Social Security, the minutes of which were released today by the Directorate-General for Employment and Labour Relations (DGERT), the parties agreed, at the request of ANA, to "postpone the negotiation of the effective means to a later time, after the totality of minimum services defined for this strike are known".

"ANA highlighted the need to reach an agreement on the principle of combining the various services necessary to carry out the minimum services, already defined or to be defined," the minutes read.

In this sense, the company requested that Sitava "send the agreements already reached by this union," postponing the negotiation of the effective means.

At the meeting, ANA stated that it was not, at this moment, "in a position to advance any concrete proposal" for minimum services, since it has "no knowledge of what minimum services have been decreed for the Autonomous Region of the Azores and, from the airlines, the best information it has is that, globally and on average, about 30% of the flights scheduled for that day have been defined."

"Given this information and the fact that other unions with a large number of members have not formally joined this strike, it is not possible for ANA to provide concrete figures," the document states.

Sitava explained that, throughout the meetings held and the agreements reached, it has "taken care to maintain consistency and continuity in defining minimum services for airport activity."

The CGTP and UGT called a general strike for December 11th, in response to the proposed labour law reform presented by the Government. This will be the first strike to bring together the two trade union confederations since June 2013, when Portugal was under the intervention of the 'troika'.