The General Workers’ Union will not be discouraged by the persistent hostility from the government, general secretary Tony Zarb said yesterday.
The GWU is here and here it will stay
Historically, he said, various Nationalist governments throughout its 68-year history were always hostile towards the union, putting spokes in its wheels and creating all kinds of hurdles. Despite this, the union continued to grow and enrolled 4,000 new members in the past two years.
Delivering a passionate speech at the end of the union’s biennial national conference, Mr Zarb accused the government of discriminating against it but said that even this would not stop it from pursuing its efforts to improve workers’ conditions and standard of living.
He said the government had appointed Union Ħaddiema Magħqudin general secretary Gejtu Vella as director of the consumer authority and UĦM president Gejtu Tanti on the board of the Employment and Training Corporation, but GWU officials were left out of any appointments.
Mr Zarb said the union would never forget statements that, for example, its headquarters should be changed into a block of flats. It would also not forget the financial whack it received when its subsidiary company, Cargo Handling, was robbed of its role at the port.
But this hostility will not stop the union, he insisted. “The GWU is here and here it will stay,” he said to resounding applause.
He also claimed that workers had received telephone calls from government ministries warning them not to join the GWU and that EU project proposals put forward by the union were encountering stumbling blocks, with some not being approved by certain ministries.
During his speech, Mr Zarb mentioned the thousands of new members from 40 new workplaces who had joined the union, including those working for Palumbo Shipyards, the Italian firm that took over the operations of the Malta Shipyards.
He warned the Palumbo management that if it did not give the union sole recognition of their employees, the union would take the matter to court.
Turning to the union’s efforts to improve relations with other unions and confederations, Mr Zarb said the GWU would continue to insist that Forum, a confederation representing 12 unions, be given a seat on the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development. Employers had five seats while workers’ representatives only had four.
The government was an accomplice in the creation and growth of precarious work involving workers in hospitals, health centres, government departments, government entities and even the ETC.
He said the exploitation of care workers, security personnel and cleaners could be brought to an end if the government employed them directly, leading by example. There were people who worked between 70 and 80 hours a week for €3.50 an hour.
The union would continue to highlight how the country needed a change, with a government that listened to and was sensitive to people’s concerns and suffering.
During the conference, the GWU delegates approved seven motions which, according to Mr Zarb, provide the union with its roadmap for the next two years.
The motions dealt with precarious jobs and the minimum wage, efforts to improve relations between unions, pensoiner’s standard of living, fostering the union culture among professional workers, health and safety on the workplace and the self-employed.