The Malta Labour Party called on the government to add the necessary manpower to industrial tribunals so as to be able to process complaints about conditions of work and to set up an ad hoc commission representing the government’s interests, those of employers and those of employees, to ensure that injustices in that sector would not continue.

The MLP said poor conditions of work facing part-time employees were widespread but suffering the most were workers in the cleaning and security services sectors. Employers were trampling workers’ rights, including employers competing for government contracts.

The government was washing its hands of this problem. What it was doing was to say that every worker having his rights infringed could present a case at the industrial tribunal citing unfair dismissal, to ask for compensation and possibly the job back.

The government reaction was totally weak when it shed the responsibility for action on to part-time workers themselves, who would on their own have to fight large companies. In this situation the government had a position of strength which it was not using, the MLP said.

This was because these exploited workers were often engaged on tenders awarded by the government itself, doing cleaning or security work in hospitals, authorities, and departments, for instance.

All that the government needed to do was to ensure that these workers had pro-rata conditions of work according to law.

The rate at which the industrial tribunal was being operated cannot keep up with this increase in the number of complaints being lodged. Before these abuses started being reported, the tribunal was already backward in its workload because of government foot-dragging in appointing new members to the tribunal.