Casual lecturing staff at the University of Malta and G. F. Abela Junior College are regularly waiting months to receive payment for their work, according to various lecturers.

One casual lecturer at Junior College, who asked not to be named, said staff were asked to submit a request for payment last December for work done since the start of the academic year.

Despite being told they would be paid at the end of February, they were recently advised that payment had been delayed a further month until the end of March.

So-called casual lecturers are assigned a number of lectures throughout the academic year depending on requirements.

A University spokeswoman said normal procedure was for payment requests to be submitted at the end of the Christmas and Easter periods. These were then collated, processed and forwarded to payroll.

“Payments for casual lecturing undertaken during the October-December period are effected during February-March depending on when requests are received collectively and submitted for payment. In this case payment will be made by the payroll of March 30.”

Other lecturers, however, told Times of Malta they had experienced similar problems on a number of occasions in the last few years.

One said she had not yet been paid for grading undergraduate theses in June 2014.

Another lecturer said she had been appointed to a board responsible for developing the Matsec O-level syllabus in late 2011.

After the board concluded its work in the summer of 2012, she received no payment or communication from the University’s finance office for nine months.

A third lecturer said she was employed to deliver three lectures a week at the University between February and May last year.

Despite being told that she would be paid on a monthly basis, the lecturer said she did not receive payment until November. On a separate occasion, the same lecturer was employed to supervise an MA dissertation, receiving her pay this February for work done last September.

She said all her payment requests had to be processed by the Head of Department rather than directly by the finance office, which was resulting in long delays.

“If we didn’t keep chasing, we’d never get paid.

“For some people, this is a sole source of income, and it’s not right to treat them this way,” she said.