Guess who’s next in line

The acrimonious split with Josephine Attard Sultana goes back a long way – back to the tumultuous election and referendum year in 2003, with Tony Zarb at the forefront of the no campaign

After more than 20 years militating with Malta’s largest union, Josephine Attard Sultana finds herself sacked by the GWU and charged with working against workers’ interests – a charge the career trade unionist from Hal Qormi does not take lightly despite her habit of smiling even when recounting the most dramatic episodes of her story.
She describes the atmosphere within the Workers’ Memorial Building in her last days as an extremely hostile one, the scene of plots and counter-plots, venomous anonymous letters against her and constant backstabbing as she was going to work in the full knowledge that they wanted her head on a plate.
“Let me put it this way, if I saw Gejtu (Mercieca) he would look the other way… we were trying to avoid each other really, that’s it,” she says.
She admits her sudden dismissal came as a shock. With the court decision to stop the extraordinary general meeting called to remove her, she was expecting maybe some kind of warning or strong declaration against her, but the central administration bulldozed its way to do precisely that which the court tried to stop the delegates from doing.
It goes back a long way – Attard Sultana tracks it back to 2003, that tumultuous election and referendum year when the country was divided on the crucial European Union membership question, with Tony Zarb at the forefront of the no campaign.
For the first time, Attard Sultana declares she was openly against Zarb’s stand and since then she has been sidelined.
“Things have been going for the worse since the last general election. They tried depicting me as a Nationalist, they actually said it,” she says, smiling at the absurdity of it. “It’s been going on since the EU question. The people I represented, from the public service, when I consulted and asked them what threats they perceived with EU membership, they were mostly seeing it as positive for them. A substantial number of them were in favour, and I was representing them. But this was being used against me, to obscure me. I was against the union coming out against EU membership in that way. I believe the union had to inform its members about where they stood to gain and where they stood to lose, the positive and the negative, and leave it up to them to decide. We had to give them all the information they deserved as our members. The international unions were all in favour, they were asking us what the hell we were doing here (xil-Madonna qed taghmlu hemm?) But the way the situation escalated got out of hand. Even the UHM didn’t tackle it correctly. The members had to decide what was best for them.”
The same year of the referendum was also the year in which Zarb was meant to be removed from the helm of the union once and for all, just in the wake of the national election, after all section secretaries and the administration had agreed that Tony Zarb would be forced out of office, until their decision was overruled by the union’s council.
“That’s when I realised some things were pre-planned. You hear ‘this was not what we had agreed’ – everything was decided about how the central administration would be in the future,” she says. “In spite of Tony Zarb’s attempts at slandering me with my colleagues now by saying I asked him for a job, he had actually asked for a job back then and it was decided to keep him employed with the union – nobody threw him out in the streets. With that there were also negotiations from people surrounding Zarb, including that for a full time job of the president – Salvu Sammut is the first full-time president at the GWU. It was part of the package. Everyone was trying to grab something for himself in those negotiations.”
Freed from the constraints of the union’s repressive media ban, Attard Sultana now spills the beans about how the mammoth institution has “killed” discussion, describing the leadership as “totalitarian”.
“I couldn’t even speak, not even on our own newspaper. I had to ask Tony Zarb’s permission to speak to the press. In fact last week we wanted to issue a press release from our section of not more than 10 lines to express our satisfaction after the court accepted our case, but he said it would be discussed by the central administration and there’s where it ended. I also asked to give a press conference and the reply I got was that enough was already out in the open. I still insisted that my voice, and that of the section’s executive, was not being heard, I couldn’t speak officially. They objected to my every request.
“Discussion within the union has been killed. It’s me, you have to be like me, by force. No discussion whatsoever. You can’t discuss freely, at all. I tell my colleagues that if I didn’t take certain stands I would probably still be there. But that’s a union, you have to discuss your core issues.
“Every institution has its way of turning things against an individual, they manoeuvre you (jahdmuk), to the point of finding yourself in a situation that whatever you say is irrelevant, everything is decided and you don’t count anymore. I never undermined the union, but in our discussions I used to say what I felt was wrong, what I felt had to be tackled differently. What’s wrong with that? I’m not interested in attending meetings as a piece of furniture.”
Attard Sultana goes on in her indictment of the union she cannot recognise any longer.
“When I was a child my father used to depict to us the union as something you look forward to join when you start working. Now it’s no longer the union I know. There have always been cliques and arguments along the years but not of this type, definitely not of his type. Now everyone is grabbing to his niche, without really looking at the workers’ needs.
“If, as they are saying, some of the industrial questions of our section were taking a bit long to settle, workers are also questioning what happened after we took them out to the streets and appealed to the ILO about the public holidays. Two years have passed and we’re still without our public holidays, so there you have it. But I understand, with a sense of maturity, that you can’t get back to what you had before the public holidays were removed, I understand that, but that’s not the way they dealt with me. They weren’t backing me in informing our members that negotiations were under way, things were moving. Instead of defending our section, like a father and a mother defending our children, the union was flogging its children. A colleague of mine said just that – that instead of using militancy to improve our workers’ conditions, we’re using it to flog our own workers.”
Attard Sultana counteracts Zarb’s charge that she did not give a good service to her members by saying that her efforts were directly undermined by himself and Gejtu Mercieca, although her section still managed to raise membership to around 400.
She acknowledges the problems she had with nursing aides and Water Services Corporation workers.
“There weren’t impossible problems, normal everyday problems that come with the job, but some had an interest in inflating them and creating issues to obscure me and get to their targets,” she said.
Are you referring to Gejtu Mercieca and Tony Zarb?
“They definitely had a say. For things to have developed this way they had a say in it. I know the people behind the petition were holding meeting with members of the central administration. Alright, they have a right to meet anyone they want to, but it makes you realise there’s something going on. It wasn’t just being led by the delegates. The request in their petition was twofold – to remove me and to appoint someone else. This couldn’t happen in the same session – you need a period for nominations and call elections. The way they pushed it, it became clear there was something nasty.”
Attard Sultana refers to last October’s union elections as a “negative and bitter experience” which left bad vibes all across the union structures.
“I said in this case it would not be different. While the commission was doing its work to verify the petition signatures, we knew that the extraordinary meeting and the run-up to it would not be democratic or independent. They would have done everything to put me at a complete disadvantage. They sent anonymous letters with disgusting messages about me, after they acquired the addresses of delegates – they could only acquire them from me or from the administration, and they kept phoning people. I was still trying to do my work as section secretary while all this was going on, facing all kinds of allegations all the time. When it was clear that the petition was losing the required 40 per cent signatures of the section’s delegates they started panicking and went as far as stopping the commission from scrutinising the petition further.”
Tony Zarb says the commission set up to scrutinise the petition against her was irrelevant, he doesn’t recognise it, but Attard Sultana says he only “went berserk” as soon as he realised it was reaching a conclusion that he did not want to hear.
“He was informed about it even before it started its work, as was the council – nobody objected. When they realised the commission was reaching a result which they didn’t want to hear then they went berserk.”
If there were a number of delegates withdrawing their signatures, wouldn’t it have made sense to go for a vote of confidence anyway?
“We weren’t on an equal footing. With all the disgusting things that were happening, it was clear that if we went for the meeting I would be removed – it was decided. There was so much pressure on the delegates and it was all pre-determined.”
Who would you say is leading the union today?
“Tony Zarb and Gejtu Mercieca. I wouldn’t put them in reverse order because Tony Zarb is not the lamb he’s perceived to be.”
About Mercieca, Attard Sultana says: “We could never agree on anything. Even when we had section secretaries’ meetings he would always try and shut me up as soon as I start talking, he’s that type, particularly in my regard, even before he became deputy secretary general. He couldn’t accept me making a point in a meeting, but disagreement is part of the discussion, I have a right to speak.”
As section secretary did you ever feel pressure from Gejtu Mercieca to be ‘militant’ with the government?
“The point is that we were always under the spotlight, all the time, whatever we did. I kept him informed wherever we needed to take action and all that. I have no problems if some member contacts him and complains about me, but it was his duty to get to know the truth behind their complaints and decide if I was in the right. Despite my explanations he kept siding with the complainants, whose complaints were based on ill-founded conclusions and mistaken assumptions.”
Did you ever discuss section problems frankly with Mercieca?
“Yes but he always kept contradicting me on everything, always arguing his way. You’d find for example a shop steward who is inflating a problem which when you investigate it you realise it’s not the bomb they’re trying to explode. So of course you have to act on complaints and problems but you have to keep everything in perspective. I believe you can be militant in a mature way. It seems their idea of militancy is to make a lot of noise and go immediately on the warpath. I want to assess the situation first; you have to understand both your members and the management you’re negotiating with.
“The water services group keep inflating problems; the nursing aides have backing from above. I have a letter which they sent to the secretary general referring to a promise he had made to them that he would remove me after two months (since his re-election). They refer to a promise they say he gave them that he would remove me in two months. He tried skirting around the issue with me but now the facts show clearly that was just what he intended to do.”
Now, everyone seems to be asking who’s next in line after her.
“It’s true, it’s true,” she says.
They are clearly Karmenu Vella – section secretary for the media and services and Emanuel Zammit, representing port workers.
“They were the only section secretaries to stand by me in the ordeal. There was no support from the other sections. There may have been some individuals but I understand their section secretaries tried to dominate them. In the open it was only Karmenu and Emmanuel’s sections that remained close to me till the end, till I left the union building for the last time.”
Are you afraid they might suffer the consequences?
“I’m concerned they might go through what I’ve been through. It’s clear now. Definitely the sections of Karmenu Vella and Emmanuel are under the spotlight, we were like under a hawk’s gaze. I ended in a situation where I would be observed if I cross over to Emmanuel’s section, the same if I go to Karmenu, as if talking to your colleagues is a bad thing, in their obsession that just because you speak to your colleagues you must be plotting and inciting. Now I realise they also wanted to use the occasion to attack George Abela. The allegations they made in their press release, published front page on l-orizzont, are downright slander. In fact he is suing them for libel.”
Emmanuel Zammit made it clear to the administration that he would only work with George Abela in the negotiations.
“Thank God he is still there,” Attard Sultana says about Zammit. “I can’t say what will happen, but when you see hostility there is in the air, things are not very promising.”