Carris's Tourism Arm Walks Out for Twelve Hours on 2 and 9 May — STRUP Calls Two Saturday Strikes at Carristur Over Pay, the 35-Hour Week and a Stalled Acordo de Empresa, With Hop-on Hop-off Buses, Historic Trams and Tagus Cruises Exposed

STRUP — the Sindicato dos Trabalhadores de Transportes Rodoviários e Urbanos de Portugal, under the Fectrans federation — has filed twelve-hour strike notices at Carristur, the wholly owned tourism subsidiary of Lisbon's municipal transport operator Carris, for Saturday 2 May and Saturday 9 May. The walkouts will run from 07:30 to 19:30 on each of the two Saturdays. Union dirigente Manuel Leal told Lusa late on Wednesday that the call follows a Carristur board decision to put a single offer on the table and refuse to negotiate further on the salary scale, the meal subsidy or a phased move to a 35-hour working week.

What is being struck

Carristur is 100% owned by Carris — Companhia Carris de Ferro de Lisboa, the city's public-transport operator — and runs four distinct lines of business that sit outside the regular bus and tram network: the open-top sightseeing bus circuits that fan out from Marquês de Pombal and Praça do Comércio; the rental of Lisbon's historic yellow trams for private events and exclusive tours; cruises on the Tagus river; and a national long-distance coach charter operation. The company also runs Carris's training arm. The subsidiary's tourism vertical is the most exposed to the strike, and the chosen Saturdays — sandwiching the May Day long weekend on the first call, and the start of the European travel-trade Iberian Tourism Forum cycle on the second — sit squarely inside the early shoulder season when the open-top buses run a peak Saturday timetable.

What STRUP is demanding

The union wants four concrete things: a real increase in base salaries; a higher meal subsidy; a phased reduction of the working week from the current 40 hours to 35 hours; and a full revision of the company-level collective agreement (the acordo de empresa) that has been on the table for months. STRUP says the Carristur board has flatly refused to discuss any of those four headline asks, and that the negotiation rounds collapsed when the administration informed the union it considered the matter closed pending the outcome of the strike action.

What Carristur has agreed to

Per the union's communiqué, the board did move on the lower-stakes items in the parallel revision of the acordo de empresa. Carristur accepted the evolution of the seniority increment from nineteen to twenty anuidades, with the unit value rising to €10 — a €0.52 per-anuidade bump. The board has also agreed to clarify the holiday-pay majoração, refine the formula for calculating overall remuneration, and integrate the public holidays specific to Madeira and the Açores into the company agreement for staff based in the autonomous regions. None of those concessions, the union argues, address the central pay and hours question.

The negotiation breakdown

STRUP's account is that the Carristur board told the union it would suspend the negotiation process until after the 2 May walkout, but the union counters that Fectrans remains available "para se encontrarem as soluções que permitam a suspensão do pré-aviso de greve" — for finding the solutions that would allow the strike notice to be lifted. "Está, pois, nas mãos da administração da Carristur criar as condições para, com abertura negocial, evitar a greve," the union said in its statement: it is now in the hands of Carristur management to create the conditions, through openness to negotiation, to avoid the strike. Carristur did not respond to a Lusa request for comment.

Wider Carris labour context

The Carristur action is the second labour-relations flashpoint at the Carris group inside a fortnight, and lands the same week CGTP-IN's National Council voted to call a second nationwide general strike for 2 June against the Pacote Laboral / Trabalho XXI reform, with Tiago Oliveira slated to formally announce the date at the May Day rally at Saldanha. STRUP is a Fectrans affiliate and Fectrans is a CGTP federation — the Carristur calendar is calibrated to that wider rhythm, with the second 9 May walkout falling in the run-up to the June general-strike date.

What this means for visitors and residents

If you have a hop-on hop-off Lisbon city tour booked for Saturday 2 May or Saturday 9 May through one of the major resellers, the operating carrier on the yellow open-top fleet is Carristur — meaning your circuit may be cancelled or run on a reduced timetable inside the 07:30-19:30 window. The same applies to private historic-tram bookings and to Tagus river cruises sold under the Carristur brand. Carris's regular city-bus and tram services — operated by Carris itself, not Carristur — are not covered by this strike notice and are scheduled to run normally on both Saturdays. Travellers who booked through a third-party platform should expect the operator to attempt a re-booking onto an alternative provider before issuing refunds; under Portuguese consumer law, a strike at the contracted operator does not automatically void the consumer's right to a refund or substitution.

Source: Observador / Agência Lusa, 30 April 2026, 23:11.