Education is one of the non-negotiable aspects of most societies, including ours. On the other hand, educators, being employees, enjoy labour rights, including the right to join a trade union and strike to improve their working conditions.
It needs hardly be stressed that students’ best interests are of paramount importance in every matter that affects their future.
The MCAST’s negotiations for a new agreement defining lecturers’ working conditions have been ongoing for the last three years with no conclusion. This affects the employment prospects of students on the verge of graduating as the Malta Union of Teachers has issued a series of directives to its members. Some of these directives directly impact marking students’ work and exams.
The impasse does not just reflect the education authorities and the MUT’s confrontational industrial relations management.
It is evident that students’ and educators’ rights are not given the importance they deserve by policymakers who often boast of wanting the country to aim for quality and excellence in whatever it does.
Quality education can only be defined by the investment in the inputs: teachers, the learners’ background and the infrastructure. This investment must be aimed at improving the teaching process, which is so complex, with the ultimate aim of improving the expected outcome, which is students’ performance.
Unfortunately, the frequency of educators’ industrial actions seems to have gained public tolerance, if not complete acceptance. Still, strikes in the educational sector have a lasting and devastating impact on educators’ and students’ discipline, motivation and morale, with students being the hardest hit.
The MCAST comments on the ongoing breakdown of industrial relations lack credibility. Despite the obvious frustration of students about the way they are being affected by the current dispute, MCAST argues that its management is committed to respecting the MUT directives currently in place “while ensuring that students’ academic progress and well-being are prioritised”.
Marco Bonnici, president of the MUT, comments that talks on the MCAST agreement are being held at the Office of the Prime Minister with “meetings held on a weekly basis”. This is not good enough. Students have a right to proceed with their studies without the stress of dealing with the consequences of a breakdown in industrial relations over which they have no control.
They will do well to go beyond signing petitions “to end the academic limbo for students and educators” and protest publicly and peacefully for their rights to education to be fully respected by the education authorities and their lecturers’ union.
Any industrial action resolution framework that may exist to ensure that trade union directives that impact critical public services, like education, do not harm the well-being of the victims of such action is ineffective. It is time for changes to be made to ensure that when collective bargaining fails to lead to an agreement in a reasonable time, there will be effective arbitration mechanisms to ensure that an equitable solution is found.
The education ministry should move from moralising about students’ rights to a serene ‘educational journey’ to concluding negotiations, if need be, in daily meetings.
This dispute that is undermining students’ future employment prospects must urgently come to an end.
In the past few months, the prime minister has often expressed his optimism that the MCAST collective agreement impasse should soon be over. Now that negotiations are being held at his office, he must ensure that “the best interest of students” is not just a sound bite but the compass that guides his government’s education policies.