A situation which suddenly turned ugly was later resolved with a commitment to hold a meeting tomorrow and the union lifting its industrial action.

A statement issued by Maltapost yesterday evening said: “At 2pm management closed the doors of its Central Mailroom at the Qormi Road Head Office in Marsa, as a result of the escalating directives imposed over the past week. The directives had got to a point where Maltapost was unable to provide an appropriate service to its customers.”

This description of the situation was hotly contested by Union Haddiema Maghqudin secretary general Gejtu Vella in comments to The Malta Independent on Sunday yesterday. Not only was the union not intensifying its directives, he said, in certain cases the actions had actually been scaled down, since they involved different sectors of the workforce.

Maltapost’s press statement says nothing about the bomb scare, but UHM officials said it was a Maltapost official who told the employees to get out of the building as there was a bomb scare.

Mr Vella said this looked like being a fake bomb scare and a stratagem to get the people out of the building with the minimum of fuss, since management might have feared that the workers would stage a sit-in if they sensed they were being locked out.

If this was the case, Mr Vella said, it was “highly irresponsible”. Maltapost’s CEO Robert Lake too, he said, was perturbed by what happened and the chain of events which led to the bomb scare now being investigated by the police.

With the workers out of the building and the resulting tension, the union’s top officials, including Mr Vella and union president Gejtu Tanti, were called to Maltapost. They met the Maltapost senior management and, after a short discussion, both sides came to an agreement.

Management accepted to cancel the lock-out and to pay the employees for the time they were locked out. A meeting will be held tomorrow at which the manning levels in all sections of the company will be examined minutely and a solution to the industrial dispute sought. The union accepted to lift its industrial action.

Mr Vella remarked that what is really worrying is the accumulating backlog of 13 collective agreements still being negotiated, many of them overdue. Mr Vella referred to the Collective Bargaining Unit (CBU) set up by the government to handle all negotiations in the public sector. The union, he said, is not against the idea of the CBU, but it should be allowed to negotiate, as its name implies, instead of coming to negotiating table with a pre-set attitude.

Recourse to ministries is not working either, he complained, as they all point to the CBU and tell the union to deal with it.