Police contain tense situation at airport

Two Llucmajor taxi drivers are on the wanted list by picketing Palma cabbies after they were spotted picking up clients in the Playa de Palma area yesterday. The president of the Autonomous Group of Taxi Drivers affiliated with the Association of Small Businesses, PIMEM, warned that had the two cabbies run across any of yesterday's striking Palma taxi drivers they would have had problems. Pedro Moragues described their activities as “clear provocation” by operating along the Playa de Palma and in the city centre where there were no taxis yesterday for the second day as the 48 hours all out strike reached its end at midnight last night. Moragues confirmed that the second day of the strike has been a 100 per cent success, although fewer taxis gathered at the airport, opting to just stay away all together. Just one non-Palma taxi, from Pollensa, crossed the picket lines at Palma airport in order to collect a client and only managed to pick up the passenger under police protection and a barrage of abuse from striking Palma cabbies. Yet again it was air passengers and the general public who were hardest hit. Faced with empty taxi ranks at the airport and in Palma, EMT public busses were operating to capacity. Today, taxi services should be back to normal, bar calls for a last minute extension to the strike, but tomorrow, Palma taxi drivers will continue with their Saturday stoppages in protest over changes in the law which have ended their exclusive right to collect passengers at ports of entry. This morning the Mayor of Palma Joan Fageda will be holding a meeting in Madrid with Development Minister, Francisco Alvarez Cascos, and all hopes rest with the two men for a solution to be found and the stoppages called off as taxi drivers enter their fourth week of industrial action.