An­na-Lisa Paul

There is ab­solute­ly no truth to ru­mours that 250 short-term em­ploy­ees of the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion will be sent home with­in the next two months.

This is ac­cord­ing to Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter An­tho­ny Gar­cia who yes­ter­day said the claims were "to­tal­ly false."

In a let­ter sent to me­dia hous­es on Thurs­day, the work­ers claimed moves were afoot by the min­istry to send them home as the min­istry was re­fus­ing to re­new con­tracts which are due to ex­pire at the end of Sep­tem­ber.

They wrote, "To date, we have not been in­formed what would hap­pen af­ter this. Re­peat­ed calls to HR has been met with HR say­ing they are not sure what the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion is and have not been giv­en any in­struc­tions."

Adding that re­cent changes in the min­istry's per­ma­nent sec­re­taries had al­so re­sult­ed in un­cer­tain­ty as they were await­ing in­struc­tions from the Min­istry of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions as to the or­gan­i­sa­tion­al struc­ture to be per­ma­nent­ly im­ple­ment­ed, the em­ploy­ees said while this was be­ing done they re­mained in lim­bo as their job se­cu­ri­ty was no longer guar­an­teed.

Gar­cia ex­plained that the min­istry had con­tract work­ers in var­i­ous cat­e­gories scat­tered through­out dif­fer­ent de­part­ments.

He said these short term em­ploy­ees were hired based on the im­me­di­ate needs of the min­istry at the time and that when these needs were ful­filled, "Those con­tracts will come to an end."

Adding that the peo­ple hired in these po­si­tions are ful­ly aware of the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing short-term con­tracts, Gar­cia said there were al­so medi­um-term con­tracts of­fered when the min­istry re­quired work­ers for a par­tic­u­lar task and they did not have the rel­e­vant posts avail­able.

He said these con­tracts of­ten spanned a pe­ri­od of be­tween one and three years.

Gar­cia said it was the pol­i­cy of this Gov­ern­ment to try and elim­i­nate con­tract po­si­tions where pos­si­ble and have peo­ple be­come a per­ma­nent part of the pub­lic ser­vice, but that if and when con­tracts ex­pired at the min­istry the work­ers would be pre­sent­ed with month­ly con­tracts un­til a more per­ma­nent de­ci­sion is tak­en re­gard­ing their po­si­tion.