GWU suffers massive decline in collective bargaining
Private sector’s collective agreements down to 25% from 30% in 13 years
James Debono Just 25% of full-time employees in the private sector were covered by a collective agreement negotiated by a trade union in 2008, down from 30% in 1995, a study by industrial relations experts Godfrey Baldacchino and Rebecca Gatt shows.
While the number of full-time employees in the private sector increased by 28% in the past 13 years – from 67,260 in 1995 to 85,778 in 2008 – the number of workers covered by collective bargaining only increased slightly, from 22,128 to 22,879 over the same period.
The decline in the overall portion of workers covered by collective agreements coincides with the loss of 6,000 jobs in the strongly unionised manufacturing sector, and the additional creation of 24,500 service sector jobs.
In the private sector, collective agreements fell from 212 in 1995 to 168 in 2008.
The study shows that the General Workers’ Union suffered the brunt of economic restructuring, with the number of collective agreements it negotiated decreasing from 158 in 1995 to 109 in 2008. But the number of agreements negotiated by the Union Haddiema Maqghudin remained the same (42).
The Malta Union of Teachers was responsible for seven collective agreements in 2008, up from three in 1995.
The four economic sectors with the highest proportion of workers covered by collective agreements were: financial intermediation (66%), education (58%), manufacturing (47%), and transport and communications (44%).
In contrast, all of the other economic sectors reported a much lower density of collective agreement coverage, ranging from 0% in the agricultural and fishing sector to 14% in the real estate sector and 16% in the food and accommodation centre.
Only 7% of construction workers and 4.2% of workers in the retail sector were covered by a collective agreement.
Although the financial sector has the highest number of workers covered by a collective agreement, only four out of 22 licensed banks in Malta had a collective agreement in force. Moreover, out of 46 registered insurance-related companies, two had a collective agreement in force in 2008.
The bulk of workers covered by a collective agreement in private education were the 1,459 teachers engaged in 81 ‘church schools’. Besides this, seven other privately-run ‘independent schools’ had a collective agreement in place in 2008.
Over one-third (38%) of all private sector collective agreements in force in Malta in 2008 were in the manufacturing sector. All workers in the 10 largest manufacturing companies – each with 300 or more full-time employees – were covered by such agreements. Workers in 51 other manufacturing companies were also covered by collective agreements.
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