MCAST dispute leaves lecturers unpaid

Part-time lecturers at MCAST have not received their October salaries after industrial directives issued in a dispute between the college and UĦM blocked the administrative work needed to process contracts and payment claims, Times of Malta reported.

The dispute is not about the lecturers. It concerns a new collective agreement for administrative and support staff. But at a college, payroll is not an abstract right floating above the filing cabinets. Someone has to answer the email, approve the claim, process the contract. UĦM’s directives tell administrative employees not to answer calls or emails, or to process and approve contracts and payments. The effect has been precise enough: full-time lecturers got their regular salaries, part-timers did not, and overtime due to full-time staff is also stuck.

That distinction matters. It shows where the system bends first. The people with the loosest attachment to an institution are often the first to carry the cost of a dispute they did not start and cannot settle. A part-time lecturer can teach the class, mark the work and still remain, in administrative terms, an incomplete transaction.

One lecturer told Times of Malta that if the situation drags on, staff could spend months without salary. That is not a rhetorical inconvenience. For part-timers, delayed payment lands as rent, groceries and transport, not as a line in an internal memo. Public institutions are fond of speaking about flexibility when they hire. Flexibility looks different when the money stops moving.

UĦM told the newspaper that negotiations with MCAST had reached an advanced stage but declined to comment further, saying public remarks could jeopardise the process. That may be a fair tactical judgment in bargaining terms. It does not change the practical result inside the college: one group is exercising industrial pressure, another group is absorbing it in cashflow.

The previous collective agreement for the administrative and support staff, signed in October 2023, secured better financial terms, career progression and improved flexi-time benefits. This round of negotiations appears to have stalled long enough for the union to escalate. What remains unanswered is whether MCAST has any contingency for keeping unrelated workers paid when an internal administrative chain is deliberately frozen.

Institutions usually discover their real design in the interruption, not the brochure. At MCAST, the interruption has shown that teaching can continue only up to the point where someone in an office is permitted to press “approve”.