Employment will no doubt be one of the issues that will be extensively debated during this election campaign. GonziPN is hammering home the message that 20,000 jobs have been created and that Maltese workers have never had it so good. However, the reality in the employment sector and the experience of many workers point to the hollowness of this claim. The general feeling among many workers is that working conditions have deteriorated and that precarious employment is becoming more and more widespread and resorted to in order to remain in a job. For those who have to support a family, this is a worrying factor.
Precarious work is usually defined as employment that is underpaid, unprotected, insecure, not enough to support a family, and not conforming to the standard and legal working conditions in the country. Women continue to be the most vulnerable to precarious employment conditions. Those lacking adequate education and training are also particularly vulnerable to the exploitation resulting from precarious employment.
In addition, job security is an essential element for social justice and stability in our society. The current evolving financial and economic situation should present challenges for innovative enterprise, and not excuses for undermining a person's right to secure employment.
One should start with a snapshot of the employment sector in order to put the debate into perspective. The brief survey that follows is based on Eurostat’s latest Employment Statistics and on the NSO’s Gainfully Occupied Population Statistics: July 2012, published on 5 December.
The employment rate – the proportion of the working age population in employment – is considered a key economic and social indicator, and has a direct bearing on the development and stability of the labour market. In the EU, the employment rate for those aged between 15 and 64 peaked at 65.8 per cent in 2008, fell to 64.1 per cent in 2010 and picked up slightly in 2011 to 64.3 per cent. The fall of 1.7 percentage points during 2009 and 2010 is explained by the global financial and economic crisis.
Malta’s employment rate followed a somewhat similar pattern, falling from 55.3 per cent in 2008 to 55.0 per cent in 2009, but reaching 56.1 per cent and 57.6 per cent in 2010 and 2011 respectively. It is to be noted, however, that Malta’s 57.6 per cent is still 6.7 points short of the EU average.
Of more significance as a development indicator is the analysis of the employment rate by gender, age and educational attainment. Eurostat’s Labour Force Survey (LFS) states that in the EU 27, the employment rate for males between 2006 and 2011 fell from 71.6 per cent to 70.1 per cent, for females it increased from 57.2 per cent to 58.5 per cent and for older workers (those aged between 55 and 64) it increased from 43.5 per cent to 47.4 per cent.
The corresponding figures in the eurozone vary only slightly. Those for Malta over the same period are significantly different. The male employment rate in Malta increased slightly from 73.3 per cent in 2006 to 73.6 per cent in 2011, the rate for females increased from 33.1 per cent in 2006 to 41.0 per cent in 2011, and that for older workers increased from 29.8 per cent to 31.7 per cent. The striking feature here is that, in spite of a significant increase, the participation of Maltese women in employment remains very low at 41.0 per cent as against an EU average of 58.5 per cent in 2011.
The above snapshot of the employment sector provides a number of indicators as to why precarious work is on the increase in Malta. The three most important issues, which I think merit an explanation, concern female employment, educational attainment and part-time work.
Female employment in Malta is on the increase. According to NSO figures, the number of gainfully occupied women was 48,011 in 2010, 50,393 in 2011, and 52,719 in July 2012. This rate of increase in female employment is much higher than the rate of increase in male employment. One is bound to raise the question of whether this trend is the result of a shift from male to female employment brought about by the creation of more precarious work than standard work. This question is a legitimate one to ask, considering that women are generally over-represented in precarious employment.
This same question gains an added dimension when one considers the evolution of part-time employment in Malta, where the participation of women is particularly high. According to the NSO, the number of people with part-time employment as their primary job in July 2012 was 32,433, of which 18,831 were women. Being a woman employed part-time makes one doubly vulnerable to precarious working conditions. Many of these female part-timers are in volatile sectors such as health care, hotel accommodation and food service activities.
The other important issue to consider is the relationship between educational attainment and precarious employment. The NSO's education statistics reveal the under-performing nature of our educational system in the section dealing with early school leavers. In 2011, the number of young people aged 18 to 24 who had achieved lower secondary level education or less, and were not in further education, reached 33.5 per cent of the total population in the same age bracket. It is still unacceptably high and a black mark for the system. What is even more worrying is that less than half (49.8 per cent) of the people with this level of education are employed, and you would not be far wrong in concluding that the 49.8 per cent who are employed are subjected to precarious employment conditions.
Precarious employment in Malta is on the increase, and those most hardly hit are female employees, part-timer workers and young people with low educational attainment. Why is this happening? After all, Malta has had a long tradition of worker emancipation and a vibrant workers' union movement, and has transposed all the EU labour legislation that defines the rights and obligations of workers and employers.
In my view, the main reason is the lack of commitment of the GonziPN government to enforce and update labour legislation. Although the various initiatives of the ETC are to be commended, enforcement of labour law is unsatisfactory, and even trained or retrained people responding to calls for employment are being pushed to accept working conditions below the minimum standards.
Employment is one of the many areas in which Joseph Muscat is focusing for a better future. This implies serious, not half-hearted, efforts to protect and incentivise women in employment, and to make it easier for them to combine work with their family responsibilities through various measures, also in collaboration with the private sector. The PL has already announced a number of concrete initiatives to increase female employment. The most concrete proposal is that of providing free child-care centres for thousands of working mothers. Initially, this will be an added cost to the government, but in a couple of years it will be a net benefit to the country, as more jobs will be created, more women will work and therefore more people will pay more taxes.
It implies raising standards in education to ensure that fewer and fewer young people lag behind in educational achievement and job training. It implies enforcing legislation to ensure that all employees, including part-time workers, are duly protected and not coerced into accepting below-standard and/or illegal working conditions. It implies, above all, applying and enforcing the law, reducing bureaucracy and creating economic growth so that decent and rewarding employment will be available to all. This is the vision of the Labour Party.
This is the vision that needs to be put into effect, along with all the stakeholders, to ensure better standards and to attain – and surpass – the European benchmarks in this area.
Dr Zammit Lewis is a PL candidate for the 8th and 11th electoral district