Judging by the amount of noise being made by the unions about the protest march tomorrow, one would think that Maltese workers were storming the Bastille in the thick of the French Revolution, blood dripping from their forehead. At issue, however, is hardly the toppling of a corrupt and decadent monarchy.
What the unions are making so much noise about is the government’s decision to remove the ‘right’ to have holidays in lieu of public holidays falling on a weekend. On this particular issue, they are saying, they are not prepared to budge.
Now can we look at this issue with a bit of perspective for a change? First, in Malta we are entitled to 14 national or public holidays and 24 vacation days a year. That is one of the largest leave entitlements in Europe. We are certainly not among the richest or most productive countries in Europe and yet we take the most days off. It does not take a genius to realise that no storming of Castille is going to make this fact go away.
Second, I know of no other European country – and remember we are now a European country in the fullest sense of the word – which grants the “right” to all men and women in employment to take an extra day off if a public holiday falls on a weekend. In fact, this right is not a right at all. As with so many other things in Malta, it was a nutty homegrown invention which a succession of Nationalist governments failed to have the political fortitude to redress.
Third, when Tony Zarb, the General Workers Union secretary general, tries to score points by saying that, with this measure, workers will be losing extra overtime income for work they perform on public holidays falling on a weekend, he is shooting himself in the foot. The purpose of a holiday is for a worker to rest, not to incentivise him with an overtime carrot. No one should uphold this principle more than a trade union leader.
Beyond these simple facts, it is the obliviousness of our unions to the continental and global picture which is truly disturbing. And this obliviousness should be most disturbing to everyone in employment, both in the private and public sectors.
Again, it does not take a financial whiz kid to get to the relevant facts and to draw some key analytical conclusions. Indeed, it is an embarrassment to point them out to trade unions who should know better.
Given our size, all Maltese enterprises and we as a country are ‘price takers’. The price of all the raw materials we import to make things, the price of everything we export and the price of everything we import to consume is dictated to us by the global market. We are not the United States, which can influence the world economy with a flick of the wrist. We are not even Luxembourg for that matter.
In this context, the Maltese government has very little leeway to determine whether a local enterprise sinks or swims. All that needs to happen for a Maltese enterprise to sink is for a competing one somewhere else in the world to make a marginally better offer in the targeted market. And when that happens, the unions can storm Castille as much as they want. The jobs will have been lost. Probably forever.
If Malta has practically no control over the global market for products and services, it has even less control over the wages workers are paid in other countries. If workers in China, Morocco or India get paid less for the same work we do, companies are going to move there.
This is not something that Lawrence Gonzi or Alfred Sant or any union leader can do anything about. It’s a simple fact of life. And the more foreign investors behold ridiculous protests over piffling issues like the number of public holidays, the faster they are going to ship out and take their business elsewhere. Car manufacturers, for instance, are currently queuing up to set up shop in Slovakia rather than Poland, simply because the latter’s unions have remained intransigently old-fashioned.
Storming Castille over whether we should continue to have more holidays than the richest countries in the world is a clear indication that Malta’s unions have not yet come to grips with the challenges faced by all those in employment in this country.
Rather than waste the country’s time and energy over the number of Republic Days or Workers’ Days falling on a weekend in the next 10 years, they should be bending over backwards to keep foreign investors here and attracting new ones. The unions’ place is not just around the table with other social partners, paying lip service to national consensus and social pacts. Their job is to pull their weight maturely in the interests of the very same workers they represent. Storming Castille because Workers Day might fall on a weekend is hardly a step in this direction.
[email protected]