GREECE's Socialist government and farm workers continued to lock horns yesterday as crippling strikes against the government's austerity programme spread to other sectors, including health and education.
The farm workers' co ordinating body in Thessaly, the hard core of the strike action, on Tuesday night rejected a fresh appeal from the Prime Minister, Mr Costas Simitis, to lift the roadblocks which have brought the country to its knees in the past two weeks.
Farm workers are pressing for a restructuring of debts, tax breaks and production incentives, which would cost an estimated 1,000 billion drachmas (£2.5 billion), around 10 per cent of spending allocated in the 1997 budget.
Mr Simitis had pleaded for "dialogue" to avoid an economic catastrophe, but farm workers retaliated with a call to other agricultural organisations to man "barricades in their thousands".
Meanwhile, teachers and social, security doctors yesterday began a three day strike against the government's tough 1997 budget and stoppages were also expected in national health hospitals and the tourism industry.
Building workers are planning to down tools today with sailors expected to join the strike movement next week in protest at the budget and in support of their claim for higher wages.
On the ground nationwide 80 roadblocks were being manned yesterday, although some roads were reopened, particularly in the southern region of the Peloponnese. The Corinth isthmus, which links the Peloponnese with the densely populated conurbation of Athens, remained open as did many secondary roads across the country, including the whole of Crete.
On the international front, Greek customs officers said truckers had turned tail at the border and made their way into central and northern Europe via Bulgaria. But dozens of foreign trucks, mainly Turkish and Bulgarian, which have been blocked in different parts of the country since the first week of the conflict, remained trapped.
Worst hit in the Thrace regions was the roadblock at Thessalonica, where some 80 vehicles were immobilised, a dozen of them British. Another dozen Iranian and British truckers were stranded at Larissa.
At Aigion, in the northern Peloponnese, 15 German, Italian, French and Dutch truckers working for the international haulage firm Danzas were all stopped at roadblocks, a company spokesman said.
Authorities countered by laying on ferries at Patras to Corinth and Piraeus, the port at Athens, to allow trucks to get to Athens albeit with a delay or one or two days.
The blockades have already cost 6.6 billion drachmas (£18 million) to some 79 import export firms in northern Greece.