Across the so-called Green Line, where United Nations peacekeepers separate the two communities, a Turkish Cypriot worker, Gulsefa Atakan, 53, said his "morale about the future had reached zero" after the latest setback.
Adonis is the son of a Greek-Cypriot postal worker and a trade unionist.
There have been protests outside the Cypriot central bank by Bank of Cyprus workers who are worried about the future of their jobs.
So, too, has the arrival of thousands of settlers from dirt-poor Anatolia: migrant workers who now exceed the 120,000 strong Turkish Cypriot population, who also turned out in droves to support Akinci.
Predictably, Cypriot nationals mostly avoid these jobs, now overwhelmingly carried out by guest workers on temporary visas.
The deal, agreed in principle by the Cypriot government, provoked an immediate reaction from trade unions, which called on bank workers to strike over potential pension cuts.
To control rising budget deficits, the Cypriot government enacted a package of austerity measures that included pay freezes for public-sector workers and cuts in social spending.
As symbol of Nicosia, the jasmine flower evoked a purer time when the city had not yet been "tainted" by an influx of poor workers from Turkey into areas of the walled city that had been abandoned by Turkish-Cypriots.
Roughly one-fourth of the Cypriot workforce is employed in trade, while the service industry is the second largest employer, with more than one-fifth of workers engaged in some service-related occupation, mostly in the tourism sector.
But although workers are in short supply in the south, thanks mainly to a property boom, only 6,000 Turkish-Cypriots commute to work in the south.A recent study by a Norwegian group, the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO), suggests that a reunified Cyprus could gain €1.8 billion a year from increased tourism and freed-up trade with Turkey.
