Unions watchdog carries no audit on membership numbers

The Registrar of Trade Unions has never carried out a proper audit on union membership and is currently in the process of recruiting inspectors which would allow it to scrutinise the information provided by unions.

Last week, MaltaToday published figures from an internal document showing that the General Workers’ Union’s membership stood at just over 18,000 in 2014, a staggering 29,000 less than the figures it submitted in the latest Registrar of Trade Unions report.

The top 10 unions and top three employers associations according to membership statistics provided to the Registrar of Trade Unions

Asked for a reaction, the GWU told MaltaToday that it had nothing to add to what union boss Josef Bugeja told MaltaToday last week, when the freshly elected secretary-general said the figures provided to the registrar were “real.”

“The numbers cannot be inflated because they are audited and checked against the records provided by employers,” Bugeja said. 

But in comments to MaltaToday, the registrar said “to date no general inspections on union membership have been carried out, however one has to keep in mind that at present the Department is in the process of recruiting additional inspectors.”

The registrar’s office, which falls under the Department of Industrial and Employment Relations, added that discussions are underway to improve the process of union membership verification.

The law grants the registrar the power to inspect the records of membership of unions at any time and trade unions are obliged to give the registrar “all reasonable facilities to do so.”

But such inspections are carried out at the request of employers at particular work places.

Membership figures seen by MaltaToday show that the GWU has lost some 6,000 members in just over eight years.

The figures seen by MaltaToday belie statistics provided by the union to the registrar, which in the 2012/3 annual report put the number of GWU members at 46,831.

Asked whether the figures provided by the GWU were trustworthy, the office of the registrar said “each year, all registered unions are obliged to submit a declaration confirming that their membership records have been brought up to date.”

However, it also noted that the definition of what constitutes a member of a union is established by the statute of the respective unions, which may differ from one union to another.

According to the figures provided in the latest registrar’s report, the GWU’s rival union Union Haddiema Maghqudin had 26,103 members in 2012/3. The third largest union is the Malta Union of Teachers, which according to the report has almost 8,000 members.  

The GWU, which perennially claims to be the largest in Malta, first provided figures to the registrar in 2001/2, with the report putting the union’s membership at 47,653.