After reading Frank Galea’s letter entitled “The UHM and MUT: just one explanation” (TMIS, 7 March), one could confirm that he does not know the history of free trade unionism in Malta.
According to Mr Galea, the UHM was founded in 1960 as MCSA to be a friendly union to the PN government. This assertion is totally incorrect because in 1966 it was the Malta Government Clerical Union that was set up and not the MCSA. Shortly after it was created, the MGCU was in confrontation with the PN government on the restructuring of the government’s clerical grades. This is a far cry from saying that the forerunner of UHM, the MGCU, was founded to appease the Nationalist government.
The second blatant mistake made by Mr Galea was when he wrote that MUT was expelled from CMTU. The truth is that the MUT was suspended from the CMTU because it took a different line of action from CMTU. Later, MUT left CMTU and joined the Forum of Unions.
The third view expressed by Mr Galea is a paranoid idea of the composition of the UHM’s membership and who runs it, as if the UHM is a sectoral clerical union.
However, he forgot to mention that UHM caters for other professionals like the paramedical grades, pharmacists, pharmacy technicians, scientific grades, dentists and the legal class. It is to be noted that the UHM signed good agreements with allowances on behalf of these professionals.
On the issue of the founding of the UHM in 1978, Mr Galea knows that the reason behind the creation of another general trade union was the logical expression of thousands of workers to have a free and independent general union as opposed to the GWU’s alignment to the Labour Party. It is history that 1977-78 saw the greatest attack on the free trade unions affiliated to CMTU including MUT. This sad saga continued to 1984, when the regime’s police raided MUT headquarters searching for cordless telephones. These events are known to Mr Bencini who at that time was an MUT activist.
The UHM was born as an independent and free trade union catering for all Maltese workers including those in professional grades, teachers included.
John M. Briffa