MUT strike at Mcast '100 per cent success'

The strike yesterday by the Malta Union of Teachers at the institutes run by the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology in Malta and Gozo was a complete success, union president John Bencini said.

The strike which was held between 10 a.m. and 12.30 p.m. elicited a response from the Mcast management that phoned the union asking to meet tomorrow.

One of the four bones of contention between the two sides which was the presentation of counter proposals to the collective agreement seems to be close to being solved with the Mcast telling the union it would have these by Friday.

Tomorrow, Mr Bencini said when contacted, the union will discuss the other three stumbling blocks.

These include the issue of adverts calling for the post of ICT lecturer with a salary of Lm11,900 making the other lectures query whether they would be paid different salaries.

Secondly, the union is claiming that Mcast is breaching the collective agreement which states that after three years, barring negative reports, lecturers are to be employed on an indefinite contract.

And thirdly, the union wants the administrative work that each lecturer has to carry out to assess students by means of the BTEC system to be distributed equitably.

Lecturers often find themselves under pressure with the amount of work the system entails to assess the development of students.

"We look forward to Wednesday's meeting and see where this will lead us.

"The union has another strike scheduled for Friday but whether we will go ahead with it or not will depend on Wednesday's outcome.

"It's funny how Mcast failed to come up with the counter proposals for the collective agreement in five months but now will present them to us in a couple of days," Mr Bencini said.