The Malta Union of Teachers (MUT) has long positioned itself as the guardian of educators’ rights. Yet its recent agreement with MCAST reveals a startling disconnect from the realities faced by lecturers. By endorsing guidelines that cram an unsustainable workload into a mere semester and a half, the MUT has abandoned its duty to protect staff welfare, instead normalizing burnout and academic dysfunction. MCAST lecturers are thus its latest casualties.
The guidelines—crafted in collaboration with MCAST—demand lecturers juggle overlapping crises: recovering missed assessments, managing dissertation extensions, and reintegrating students from past academic years. All while delivering new coursework, conducting open-book exams, and holding mandatory online tutorials. The inept union’s “solution” to this chaos? Token compensation (€5 per script, €50 per unit) that trivializes the hours required to design, invigilate, and mark assessments. Worse, the directive forces lecturers to absorb legacy issues—like 2023-2024 synoptics—on top of their existing schedules, with zero consideration for cumulative strain.
The MUT’s failure is twofold. First, it created a vacuum by delaying resolutions until crises escalated, leaving lecturers to clean up the mess. Second, it endorsed a framework that prioritizes institutional optics over pedagogical integrity. How can educators maintain quality while racing against compressed deadlines, managing resubmissions, and appeasing QA bureaucracies? The answer is simple: they cannot!
By rubber-stamping this agreement, the MUT has proven itself incapable of advocating for lecturers’ rights. Its complicity in overburdening educators—while offering crumbs as compensation—exposes a union more aligned with administrative appeasement than grassroots solidarity.
Enough is enough! Lecturers must reconsider their membership in a union that has repeatedly failed to challenge exploitative practices. The Union of Professional Educators (UPE) emerges as a credible alternative—one committed to fighting for realistic workloads, fair compensation, and meaningful advocacy. Switching to UPE is not just a choice; it is a necessary step to reclaim agency in a system that has left educators like you behind. The MUT’s legacy of betrayal must not be rewarded with continued loyalty, above all, it is a matter of asserting your dignity and asserting all your rights instead of letting others signing them away for you!
