Until 1987, the GWU had a chair in the Socialist government’s Cabinet. It is impossible to imagine how something like this could be conceivable today, and not just because there happens to be the PN in power. It would have been bizarre even when Alfred Sant was Prime Minister.

How could the GWU defend workers’ interests when it sat at the high table of political power with Dom Mintoff presiding over it? How could the Socialist government deal equitably with all unions when its Cabinet contained one of them? The answer is simple. Before 1987, the GWU was not a union. It was part of government and it was used to achieve purely political ends. By dissolving itself in the Socialist government, the GWU has permanently soiled this part of its history with all the workers’ rights violations perpetrated by the Mintoff and Mifsud Bonnici regimes.

On a broader and more insidious level, the MLP-GWU Cabinet tandem was modelled on the ideological blueprint of authoritarian communist regimes existing at the time. By equating workers’ interests with those of the state, the MLP and GWU were effectively dismantling one of the crucial pillars of liberal democracy: the separation of the State from civil society.

Although the MLP-GWU marriage was thankfully dissolved many years ago, the GWU and its media still see themselves, speak and act as if the gold wedding ring is still shining on their finger. For them, the PN is still the enemy and the MLP the bosom buddy. The GWU is a defiant Rottweiler when the PN is in government and a prissy French lap poodle when it is the MLP’s turn to run the country. During the brief Labour government hiatus in the mid-nineties, the GWU would not even take a position on the exorbitant increases in water and electricity rates. Upsetting Alfred Sant was too much for this so-called bulwark of workers’ interests.

In the main, this is the background against which the GWU’s current warning to government makes some sort of sense. The union is threatening to bring the country to a standstill at the peak of the tourist season because the government has decided to take the plunge and start closing down its defunct businesses. Consequently, for the first time, government employees are actually being fired from their jobs rather than transferred to others. The stage is being set for men and women to be made redundant if the public company they worked for and the job they used to do no longer exist.

This principle has been practised in the private sector since its inception. The fact that public sector employees have had a job for life had created a work force with two regimes. One had to abide by market principles, the other did not. To any reasonable person, this state of affairs was simply and clearly unfair. If a worker has his employment rights determined by the nature of his employer, the very notion of equal citizenship becomes questionable. How a trade union like the GWU can justify this state of affairs is beyond me.

But Tony Zarb and his boys are doing worse, much worse. Not only are they standing four square behind a status quo which amounted to institutionalised discrimination. They are actually trying to be the government. The GWU first threatened industrial action and then called on the Prime Minister to meet them. Unless he does, they are saying, they will carry out the threat of grounding the country to a halt.

This is not a serious way of running a union. It would be an even less serious way of running a country if the Prime Minister were to sit with the GWU under duress. It would amount to jettisoning one of the key distinctions made in a liberal democracy: between a government which carries out an electoral mandate and a trade union which represents its members’ interests and no more. It appears that the new boys running the GWU are still enamoured of the idea of somehow running the country, at least when the PN has a mandate to do so. The puppies are eager to learn old tricks.

Yet there is a teeny bit more to the GWU’s threat than meets the eye. In a month or so, Tony Zarb, the GWU secretary general, is up for re-election to his post. Naturally, this is the time to impress the union delegates that he still has it in him to take on the government, to draw the spotlight on himself in the August heat and to reassure his allies in the MLP that he has no plans to shift the union an inch away from the party. Even these tricks never change.

[email protected]