Last January, I had postulated that, if current trends in trade union membership and recruitment strategies persist, one could expect the UHM to reach and even overtake the GWU in the near future. With pensioners included, the UHM-GWU membership gap may be closed within 12 years; without the pensioners, the gap may be closed in as little as eight years.
Membership Scan
Official data which has just been published in the Government Gazzette bears me out. The latest annual report by the Registrar of Trade Unions is a scan on national union membership as at June 2004. 86,156 workers are organised in 34 trade union bodies, of which the General Workers’ Union (GWU) towers head and shoulders above the rest with 46,489 members (6,428 being pensioners). The Unjon Haddiema Maghqudin (UHM) follows in its now habitual second place, with 25,901 members (2,106 being pensioners). Next in line is the Malta Union of Teachers (MUT) with 6,074 members, the Malta Union of Bank Employees (MUBE) with 2,987 members and the Malta Union of Midwives and Nurses (MUMN) with 2,239. The rest of the pack consists in much smaller outfits, ranging from the Medical Association of Malta (MAM) with 628 members, to EneMalta’s senior staff union with 11 members. All trade unions except two have practically maintained their previous year’s membership levels. The only one with an appreciable increase (14 per cent over 2003) is the MUMN, with an additional 278 members. The only union with some decrease (1.6 per cent over 2003) is the GWU with 765 less members.
Two clusters
The figures confirm a basic ambivalence in our labour relations. First, trade unions are consolidating their position in a few specific economic sectors, mainly associated with professional or executive work in the public sector. Teachers (who set up their trade union, Malta’s first to be registered, in 1919) have been joined by university lecturers (now with their own union) civil servants, (para)medical staff, engineers, bank employees, tourist guides, lotto receivers, psychologists, psychiatrists, chemists, pharmacists, air traffic controllers and other professional and executive grades. These occupational classes typically share formal and tenured conditions of employment (which include written contracts), enjoy protection from market forces, and deploy credentials or licences as instruments of closure, protecting their turf from new entrants while securing above average remunerative packages. Trade unionism is both a cause and an effect of these working conditions. Collective agreements are in force. Union membership density is close to saturation. The main issue is obliging the employer (Government) to accept to negotiate new agreements before extant ones expire. Let me call this Cluster I.
Secondly, non-professional workers engaged in the private sector find themselves increasingly at the brunt of market forces and employer discretion. Non-written contracts; seasonal, part-time and casual engagements; sub-contracting; ‘hire and fire’ practices and other forms of ‘contracts for service’ are rife in sectors where the quantity and quality of employment is elastic and basically responds to demand. This is the norm in the sprawling construction sector and the numerous small and medium sized enterprises. With the increasing social burden resulting from the Employment & Industrial Relations Act (2002), itself a mirror of developments in European Union directives, and the already onerous local tax and social security burdens, both specific employers and specific workers strive to deregulate and casualise the working relationship. In this case, the absence of trade unions is both a cause and an effect of these conditions. The only protection for such workers is the national labour code. Their only concern is wages. Let me call this Cluster II.
These clusters may appear to be remarkably mutually exclusive spheres of labour relations, with their concomitant work and human resource management ethic. The gap is there but not clear-cut; also because individual firms may seek to develop a strategic combination of both Cluster I and Cluster II-type workers. On the fault-line, however, one finds the manufacturing sector (and its typically larger firms) and State-controlled enterprises. While these sectors have traditionally had unionised employees, they are nevertheless the targets, via induced government policies as well as market forces, for restructuring and downsizing. They appear to be ripe candidates for transition from Cluster I to Cluster II. But trade unions will resist any such moves tooth and nail.
Bearing the brunt
The trade union bearing the brunt of Malta’s economic changes is the GWU. This year’s figures reveal its fourth consecutive annual decline in membership. No wonder: the GWU enjoys robust support in the private manufacturing sector and State-controlled enterprises, the very same prime constituents occupying the limbo between the two, fairly stable, clusters of national contemporary employment relations.
The GWU has, almost from its birth in 1943, been Malta’s largest trade union. Fifty-four per cent of Malta’s unionized workforce still belongs to the GWU. Impressive, considering that its traditional, core ex-Malta Drydocks and Malta Shipbuilding membership has been whittled down to some 1,700.
The UHM – whose annual union membership figures have always increased since 1967 – continues in its ambition to reach and overtake the GWU as Malta’s largest trade union. However, a more significant gap has meanwhile stabilised: one which divides two almost equal halves of workers and obliges them to face different labour relations in this country. Are we comfortable with the extant dichotomy? Or would we rather see one cluster expand and encroach on the other? In which case, which is it to be?
Dr Godfrey Baldacchino is Canada Research Chair in Island Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, and on leave of absence from the University of Malta. E-mail: [email protected]