And here's another popular cause
After nurses at state hospitals and health centres, dentists in government employ, and now university lecturers, here’s the latest update on strikes and ‘work to rule’: kindergarten assistants and learning support assistants. Marching miners, picketing printers, chanting dockyard workers, locked-out assembly-line workers……ah, for the 1970s and strikes as they were meant to be. Strikes in the Noughties have lost their edge when the only people getting it in the neck are the sick, the halt, cancer patients, people who’ve eaten too many sweets, students and now…..tiny tots and children with learning problems.
The Malta Union of Teachers is to instruct kindergarten assistants and learning support assistants to take “industrial action” ….there’s a clue there as to what that kind of action was intended for originally – industry and industrial workers. But these are softer times when the only people left to get tough with are the ones in nappies and the other ones with Down’s Syndrome and dyslexia. The MUT has announced a rally for Friday, and there it will give ‘directives’ to the massed militants.
Its problem, it appears, is with the government and some things it has asked for and not been given.
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For all their talk about teaching being a vocation, the MUT does not distinguish between a kindergarten assistant(or teacher or lecturer, for that matter) and a factory machine-operator. In theory it’s a vocation, in practice it’s just a job.
Naturally, of course, the two month total strike by the very same MUT in 1984 was “heroic” and “vital in the defence of democracy”, mhux hekk? No kids suffered. Only the Labour government of the time was being hit.
O tempora, o mores.
[Daphne – Hello again, Albert. How can you compare the two situations: in 1984, the government was trying to close down the schools, for heaven’s sake. Get a grip.]
Daphne, tread carefully in this respect, as I can assure you from 1st hand experience that, for once, MUT’s grievance as regards LSA’s is well and truly justified.
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20090110/local/mut-issues-first-in-series-of-directives