Byron Camilleri continues ‘past injustices’ crusade with handouts for correctional officers

Home Affairs Minister Byron Camilleri is shoring up the government’s credentials with former and current correctional officers at the Correctional Services Agency, following the General Workers’ Union’s claim that an unspecified number of officers were not paid for overtime hours between 1994 and the present.

Describing the situation as an “anomaly” that led to a “past injustice” – a familiar refrain used by the government whenever it seeks to hand out benefits to groups with specific, longstanding grievances – the Home Affairs Ministry is now receiving applications from workers claiming they were not paid for overtime.

Though the ministry’s brief press release on the scheme states that “this anomaly was addressed through two collective agreements”, it then goes on to add that “the ministry decided that these workers are to be compensated for extra hours which they worked but did not get paid for”.

All former and current correctional officers who served for more than five years during the period outlined must complete an application form, which will then be evaluated by a board handpicked by the Minister. Even the heirs of deceased former officials are invited to apply.

“… After these discussions, we decided that those anomalies, those past injustices, must be fixed… in the same way that we addressed other injustices in the disciplined corps (state security and law enforcement agencies, in the same way that we addressed working conditions for all members of our disciplined corps with one collective agreement after another, we can address these too,” the minister noted in a Facebook reel.

The timing of the announcement and the lack of detail on how the process will be carried out, how much has been budgeted to address these alleged discrepancies, and how many workers stand to benefit all suggest that the scheme is another attempt to secure as much electoral support as possible.

Earlier this morning, the Inclusion Ministry issued a statement noting that victims of thalidomide poisoning, a condition caused by a drug that was prescribed to pregnant women in the 1950s and 1960s before being discontinued, would receive their third and final round of state compensation by the end of the week.

Last month, the government issued similar schemes targeting former employees of Malta Drydocks, Malta Shipbuilding, Telemalta, and Rediffusion, describing these schemes as efforts to address – you guessed it – “past injustices”.

The latest scheme is only one of many recent, well-documented instances in which Cabinet officials abuse their office during the electoral period to improve their odds of being re-elected.

One glaring example of this is Transport Minister Chris Bonett’s canvassers leveraging their seniority within Transport Malta to pressure their subordinates into shifting their ID card address to the minister’s electoral district.