Shipyard foremen's threat to leave GWU (2)

Mr Zarb makes very serious allegations in my regard which I totally deny. The only "agenda" I have as a journalist is to write stories of interest to our readers and to uncover things which people like Mr Zarb would rather keep hidden.

Obviously, Mr Zarb was not amused that I revealed he was washing his hands of the claims being made by foremen and supervisors at the Malta Shipyards.

I phoned him to seek his comments after they had written directly to him, and instead of replying to the questions, he asked me to direct them to Charles Agius, the shipyards' section secretary. Once the foremen had written to him and he directed me to someone else, what else could I say but that he washed his hands of the matter?

Mr Zarb's letter is full of rhetoric but it does not address any real issues.

Ambivalence was never my strong point. Mr Zarb and I have been here before. I have, at least twice, ended on the front page of the union papers, which Mr Zarb says he has no say in, simply because I sent a set of questions to him about issues of public interest. Instead of replying, he resorted to attack. Now he wants me to go through it again.

Mr Zarb knows that I have good sources and is aware of a meeting we had where I showed him a list of issues with questions about the way he is running the union.

Maybe the shipyard foremen, in spite of their threats to leave the union, will not leave. But the fact remains that they want to be paid for overtime and are claiming they lost Lm2,000 a year. I am not saying they are right or wrong. I just reported the fact.

The foremen and supervisors who spoke to me about the issue, which Mr Zarb is still skirting, are angry because they were not given what they were promised. Instead of seeing who promised them what, Mr Zarb indulged in an attack on me because I revealed that they had written to him on June 6, and they felt he had ignored them all the way.

I will not allow Mr Zarb to muzzle me. I shall be calling him whenever I think that a story requires his comments. It is not my problem if he feels unable to field direct questions and prefers to have faxes instead, perhaps to play for time and ask someone to draft replies that look credible.