MUT warns it may step up industrial action

The Malta Union of Teachers this morning accused the Ministry of Education of deception and said its council may step up industrial action as part of the ongoing dispute over allowances to teaching grades.

Replying to a statement issued yesterday by the ministry, the MUT said that while the ministry had listed salaries paid to teachers and how they increased over the past five years, it did not say that the salaries increased as part of increases rightly given to all the civil service. Furthermore, the maximum pay quoted by the ministry could only be achieved by teachers after 20 years.

In any case, the MUT said, the issue was not over the salaries, but allowances. Those allowances had increased by €69.90 per year for teachers, compared to hundreds of euro to other professions, whose duties were rightly recognised by the administration.

Despite the MUT's protests over such disparities, the government conducted a six-month study and then claimed there were no anomalies, ignoring what was clearly written black on white, the MUT said.

How could the government expect the union to go into fresh talks on a sectoral agreement when it had declared a priori that it saw no anomalies?

The union denied that any of its directives, issued yesterday, would negatively affect schoolchildren. Referring to the government statement that the directive to teaching grades not to wash toys might be detrimental to health, the MUT said the issue would not have developed had the ministry been responsible enough to employ the necessary minor staff to do such duties, since cleaning was not part of teaching duties.

The union welcomed the fact that the ministry had finally 'woken up' to the fact that heads of school and assistant heads were underpaid, but warned that attempts to bring about division between administrators and teaching staff would not work.

"The MUT regrets that the Ministry of Education was unable to bring forward the cause of its professional staff, as other ministries were able to do, and the union council will therefore meet in the coming days to review the industrial action directives and, if necessary, increase them," the union said.