Allow me to comment on the GWU’s article entitled The GWU and the Social Pact (TMID February 12) in reply to mine entitled Here we go again!

It is amazing how we still have people in our country like the central administration of the General Workers’ Union who believe that their union is the centre of the world and everything happens simply because they happen to exist.

It is an undeniable fact that the failure of the negotiations for a social pact for Malta is only because the GWU, from the very start of these negotiations, placed all the obstacles it could for an agreement not to be reached.

The GWU seems to like to jump to conclusions very easily. I could not have been carried away by the advert sponsored by the Union Haddiema Maghqudin on Sunday 6 February, since I emailed my letter to The Malta Independent on 3 February. In actual fact, I was prompted to write my article after seeing the very misleading full-page adverts sponsored by the GWU. Those adverts contained simply lies and the GWU knows very well that it is not saying the truth. The truth is that the Union Haddiema Maghqudin and those unions in the CMTU really have the workers’ interests at heart and have no other hidden agendas. We all can remember when the general secretary of the GWU sat in the Labour Cabinet of Ministers where he either kept his mouth shut or said yes to everything. We all can remember when the GWU was married to MLP in government and it stood shoulder to shoulder with that government when it reduced vacation leave and abolished religious public holidays in the 1970s. We all can remember the GWU sustaining that government when it enforced a wage freeze for several years in the 1980s. Were not the workers merely ‘sacrificial lambs’ then? Was not that ‘erosion of the workers’ standard of living’ then?

We all can remember very well when the GWU did nothing to prevent and actually helped the MLP in government to try to silence the loud voice of the Union Haddiema Maghqudin in the 1990s.

The GWU should be ashamed and not proud of its intransigence and narrow-mindedness. It was only the GWU that made it possible for the failure of a social pact for Malta initiated by the UHM.

One wonders from where the GWU is getting its statistics regarding union membership. May I just remind the GWU, and this is not nice music for the their ears, that according to official statistics issued by the Department of Industrial Relations and Employment, in the last two consecutive years, the GWU membership has declined, while the UHM registered increase in membership in the same period.

Angelo Vassallo

San Gwann