Only around 45 per cent of the national workforce is unionised, according to university studies, making mandatory trade union membership for low income workers necessary, UĦM Voice of the Workers CEO Josef Vella said yesterday.
Addressing the union’s annual Workers’ Day conference, Vella said he hoped this will become a reality by next year, especially since the government had promised a discussion on the issue in the electoral campaign. He said he was aware that some workers had lost their jobs because they joined a union.
“People need to stand up for their own rights. The choice of which union to join will be completely free but we need to protect those who are most vulnerable and those with precarious working conditions,” he said.
Vella also spoke about another problem being faced by the union in workplaces where the owner and the employer are different – as operations would have been farmed out.
Here, the union sees different classes of workers – those employed by the firm and those employed by the service provider.
No equal pay for equal value in some sectors
“Workers have become a commodity nowadays, where they are used as pawns and transferred from one contractor to another.
“We need a law to stop the outsourcing of entire core operations. Equal pay for a job of equal value does not exist in certain sectors,” he noted.
As the largest employer, the government must take a leading part in fighting abuse, Vella contended.
He reiterated his call for the government to stop outsourcing its core operations as this was leading to discrimination, whereby the contractor’s workers are being paid less than their government-employed colleagues despite doing the same job.
“One solution could be setting up social cooperatives in sectors like cleaning, security work and care workers,” he said.
Vella also spoke about collective agreement negotiations, saying any wage increase should not include the rise given for cost of living, as otherwise it would fail to have the desired effect.
He commented about the lack of unity between trade unions, saying they could be much more effective on crucial issues such as the rise in the cost of living if they presented a united front.
€7.20 rise in cost of basic items
UĦM director Mario Sacco also addressed the conference on Friday, giving details of the first results of the union’s study into fluctuations of the prices of essential products.
In the first four months of this year, a basic list of items for a family of four went up by an average of €7.20.
Economist Philip Von Brockdorff said that although the UĦM agreed with the government’s proposal for a new mechanism to help low-income households, it is calling for a revision of the retail price index from which the COLA is calculated.
This is needed, he said, to reflect the rise in property prices, mortgage costs and the online purchase of products.