General Workers’ Union secretary-general Tony Zarb appealed to construction industry workers yesterday to join a union in order to ensure a safe workplace and also suggested that illegal workers, most of whom are foreigners, should be protected by law so that they are not exploited.

Speaking during a ceremony to mark Worker’s Day, which was celebrated yesterday, Mr Zarb said workers in the construction industry should join a union because it is unacceptable that there are so many deaths and accidents on construction sites.

He said that in Malta and Gozo in 2007 there are still workers who are suffering injustices at work, sometime simply because they want to join a union to defend their rights. He said that the union is presently following a case in which workers have not been paid since the beginning of the year. The union condemns this behaviour, said Mr Zarb, and expects the association of employers to also condemn this situation.

He said that many illegal workers are being exploited in their place of work and spoke about the need for legislation to protect them from exploitation.

Mr Zarb said that on this day, the GWU was expressing its solidarity with people who are unemployed and those who were injured while at work.

The short ceremony was also addressed by Enzo Parziale, the international secretary of the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro, CGIL Campagna. Mr Parziale said he and a group of Italians were in Malta to celebrate Worker’s Day with their Maltese counterparts. He stressed the importance of good relations with the GWU and other unions in the Mediterranean and in Europe in order to ensure total cooperation on a Mediterranean and European level.

The international secretary of the Tunisian general union, the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT) Mohammed Trabelsi, said his union joins unions in the rest of the world to express solidarity with workers. Mr Trabelsi said solidarity is the only weapon by which to defeat inequality, injustice, corrupt governments and xenophobia, among other things, and ended his speech with a typical “Viva Jum il-Haddiem”.

All the participants then laid flowers at the foot of the memorial for workers in Msida.