MUT president defends union's consistency

The Malta Union of Teachers was consistent and always spoke out when workers' conditions were being eroded, union president John Bencini said yesterday.

The MUT was one of the two unions affiliated to the Confederation of Malta Trade Unions that took part in the protest march organised by the General Workers' Union on Monday.

Mr Bencini said the MUT would take part in more protests if need be as long as they were organised by the whole trade union movement and not by individual unions.

Monday's protest was not simply a protest about the reduction of holidays but a protest about many measures the government was trying to ram down unions' throats, he said.

"When a former Labour government removed public holidays, the Nationalist Party newspapers used to remind people they had been robbed of their holidays by a Socialist government. The MUT was vociferous against those moves then as it is now because we are consistent," he insisted.

"We participated with the General Workers' Union in the march it organised because, like other unions, we believed we had to show the government it cannot ride roughshod over workers.

The protest was not a political one, it was rather serene and I was happy with it. The protest created a new chapter for trade unionism in Malta and unions need to form a Trade Unions Council, focus on trade union issues and forget political differences," Mr Bencini said.

"A week before the protest the government gave us a shameful draft collective agreement through which there would be no increments for the next three years for those in the public sector and government-dependant employees, such as those in Church schools, ITS, MCAST and parastatal companies," he added.

"With the proposed measures, a teacher, and any employee in scale 9, is set to lose Lm1,152 in three years and those joining the civil service as teachers will lose Lm4,042 in seven years. Those in scale 15 will lose Lm2,688 in seven years.

"The government wants to have the prerogative so that employees in the public sector would work in a fully flexible way and it would be able to change the working hours of employees at any time," Mr Bencini said.

The CMTU has invited all trade unions to a meeting on Tuesday to discuss a common stand for its talks with the government over a national agreement aimed at enhancing competitiveness.