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The Maltese Herald

Read the MCAST Principal’s letter telling the MUT to take the matter to the Industrial Tribunal

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by

Mark Camilleri
in

From personal experience and observing the ongoings of the Ministry of Education, I’ve always seen Stephen Vella as some sort of Machiavellian individual who would go to great lengths to push forward his career. Labour always trusted him and appointed him MCAST Principal following several other promotions.

He failed to reach an agreement with the Malta Union of Teachers over their collective agreement that has been pending for two years and counting, but this is surely also the Ministry of Education’s responsibility which ultimately, takes the final decision. Escalating the matter to an industrial tribunal is a last resort that is rarely applied in matters of collective agreements with public workers , so I suppose that in this case, the Ministry of Education is using Stephen Vella to tell off the MUT.

Later today the MUT will be holding a protest at the MCAST premises.

Comments

11 responses to “Read the MCAST Principal’s letter telling the MUT to take the matter to the Industrial Tribunal”

  1. Banquo avatar
    Banquo

    Although the letter is signed by the principal, it was clearly not written by him. What gives it away is the lack of any wording in the first person. As the principal, he does not need to resort to using the third person. He can simply state ‘I’, and give a genuine opinion, but the MCAST principal is not really an independent position. The position is political, which is why a lawyer or the ministry wrote the letter which Stephen Vella had no choice but to sign.

    A serious principal would back his staff when they make reasonable demands or express disagreement through a reasoned opinion if he deems requests to be over the top. Then, he would exhort lecturers and the ministry to mitigate harm to students. In the letter, there are no principled stands; only legalese, sending the teachers’ union to an industrial tribunal as if he is a stony-faced airport security guard directing yet another perplexed tourist who cannot find his luggage towards the lost-and-found stand.

    There is not a single word about education, lecturing, salaries or his personal stance on things. You get the feeling that Stephen Vella is just a (very willing) well-paid puppet, which he obviously is, because he would never have got the job if he weren’t.

    Labour’s Malta is a fundamentally unserious country in which every position of power is held by greedy rent seekers (as Mark Camilleri’s book put it well) who are only after money and status; villas, yachts, expensive cars and other garish things which make them feel important. They are not only apathetic about education, justice and the values which lift humankind. They are also deeply ignorant about them.

    Reply
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    […] lack of a collective agreement. The agreement has been pending since 2022 and the MCAST Principal, Stephen Vella has took the bizarre decision to take the issue to an industrial […]

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    […] most bullish, deceptive, and arrogant manner possible – just as he did when he instructed the MCAST Principal to tell the Malta Union of Teachers to take their issues to an industrial […]

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    […] Teachers were protesting in solidarity with their lecturers after the MCAST administration suspended negotiations and told the union to take about the matter to an industrial […]

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    […] The government is insisting that for negotiations about salary increases to take place, the Malta Union of Teachers has to suspend its industrial actions at MCAST. MCAST lecturers began industrial action last December after the MCAST Administration declared an industrial dispute. […]

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    […] MCAST Principal Stephen Vella has slapped MCAST lecturers with new working guidelines, potentially adding even more to their already existing workload, after the Malta Union of Teachers declared to be lifting industrial action to begin negotiations over salary increases. The industrial dispute was originally also provoked by the MCAST Principal who had told the MUT to take their grievances to the industrial tribunal. […]

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