Students hostage in industrial disputes
The cost of living crisis, intensification of workloads, and extending working hours have compromised the real pay and purchasing power of low-income employees, especially those in the caring professions. The teaching profession also faces these challenges and occasionally resorts to industrial action that affects their students adversely.
The ongoing dispute at MCAST between the Malta Union of Teachers and the education authorities has been going on for too long. The current industrial action includes union instructions to MCAST lecturers and other supporting staff not to provide students with exam and assessment results and not to upload marks to any platform.
Another directive is that teaching staff are asked to limit communications with students, management, and the administration of MCAST.
The Commissioner for Education made a sensible appeal to the government and the MUT to resolve their dispute, affecting almost 8,000 students waiting for their assessment and final exam marks.
Students are understandably frustrated at being held hostage in a war between the education authorities and their educators. When teachers go on strike, students are likely to be affected by disruptions in their education and the deterioration in the prospects of furthering their education or finding the job they have worked so hard for. This is unfair to students and equally detrimental to the country’s economic performance.
Undoubtedly, the government is giving the caring professions in Malta a raw deal. Educators, like nurses and other healthcare professionals, are being pressured to become shock absorbers of a financial management crisis in the public sector.
Hundreds of millions of euros are being squandered due to wrong decisions made by policymakers in various public services. At the same time, those providing essential public services to the community are expected to keep the crumbling and often underfunded welfare services functioning while their working conditions remain inadequate.
In the absence of mandatory arbitration to definitively resolve such disputes, like the current one between the education authorities and the MUT, the interest of students must be prioritised before that of any other party.
Some countries have introduced minimum service levels for professions whose role severely impacts people’s well-being. Our younger generations should no longer be held hostage when their educators and the educational authorise are locked in a seemingly unending dispute.
Limiting the definition of ‘lawful’ industrial action and curtailing workers’ rights to spontaneous collective organising will always be controversial.
Still, it may be necessary to safeguard the interests of sections of the community that may be caught up in prolongedindustrial disputes.
Ultimately, minimum service level legislation can only go so far to hold back a flood of discontent. Decent pay and better school funding are imperative, rather than attempts to discredit teachers’ strikes as harming students.
For our educators to give their best, they must be treated with dignity. The same applies to other caring professions, especially the healthcare ones.
The low-cost labour model adopted by the government for the past decade is fallacious and must be discarded. It is time to start reversing the low-cost labour priority by setting up an independent commission to revise the working conditions of essential workers in the public service.
Revising the working conditions of the teaching and healthcare professionals will be a good place to start.
The MUT and the education authorities must immediately heed the appeal made by the Ombudsman to protect the interests of students.
The government must then engage in a meaningful exercise to demonstrate the value of teachers’ work and reward them accordingly.