The social pact

The editorial of May 19 left me very much disillusioned because a very significant detail carried in the fifth paragraph is absolutely inaccurate and it must be immediately set right.

My disappointment comes also from the fact that The Times did not have the courage to call the evil spirit a devil and the good spirit an angel. When the editor was talking about the failure by the three social partners to agree on a social pact for Malta, he very wrongly stated that "when the unions failed to respond", thus putting the blame on all the unions.

In reality and as everybody knows including the editor, what happened was that only the General Workers' Union, for reasons only known to it, failed to respond to the desperate need for a national social pact. On the other hand, the Union Haddiema Maghqudin and all the unions affiliated in the CMTU were very close to securing a social pact, which pact, after all kicked off on the initiative of the UHM itself when it commissioned a study on the subject. Eventually on March 16, last year the UHM published this study in the form of a 52-page document entitled A Social Pact For Malta for all to see and scrutinise.

The workers have now realised that the UHM was working so hard to secure this social pact only and exclusively in the best interest of the workers and in the best interest of the country.

The UHM had no hidden agendas.