Long-term unemployed wanting to join the Community Work Scheme have been informed there are no more vacancies, the Times of Malta has been told.

A group of people who said they had been registering for work for over a year complained to this newspaper that, unlike other long-term unemployed, they were not able to join the scheme managed by the General Workers’ Union on behalf of JobsPlus, the government’s employment agency.

“We were promised by top government officials that, after registering for work for some time, we would be given a job with the government through the GWU scheme,” a 52-year-old said.

“Now they are telling us the scheme is full up and there is no place for us,” he added.

An unemployed woman, who also claimed she was promised a job by a government MP if she registered with JobsPlus, complained that she had been told to wait. “It’s not fair that those who started registering for work a few months before me were employed by the government but we have now been told that the scheme is closed,” the 35-year-old mother of two from Marsa said.

Through the Community Workers Scheme, about 580 long-term jobless were struck off the unemployment register after being given a government job.

We were promised we would be given a government job

The scheme was originally put in place by the previous administration. The 222 individuals who benefitted were still bound to register for a job, though they were working for approximately 30 hours a week. Their names also continued to appear on the unemployment register.

The Labour government re-engineered the scheme, offering full-time jobs and removing the beneficiaries from the unemployment register.

The management of the scheme was also ‘privatised’, and the GWU was selected to run it for five years, receiving €980 per worker on the scheme’s books.

A minimum wage is paid to each worker from that sum.

In the meantime, according to a parliamentary question tabled by Nationalist MP Carmelo Mifsud Bonnici, Education Minister Evarist Bartolo, who is responsible for the scheme, said that since March 2013, another 359 jobless people had been recruited through the scheme and given a government job.

Asked to confirm that the scheme was now closed and that there were no more intakes, an Education Ministry spokeswoman said: “The Community Workers Scheme is intended to cater for 625 persons.”

The last intake took place in September 2015.

The spokeswoman also said that, at this stage, the government was not considering opening the scheme again.

Amid criticism that the scheme contributed to bloating the public service and that the GWU had a conflict of interest in running a government scheme while defending workers’ rights, Mr Bartolo defended it, insisting that the new set-up gave dignity to those who had been registering for work for a long time.

ivan.camilleri@timesofmalta.com

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