Earlier this year there was a stage production of the rock opera Gensna, to mark the 35th anniversary of the day Britain refused Mintoff’s pleas to renew its lease on its military base here and sailed out forever, leaving him with a massive dockyard workforce and no money to pay them, whereupon he had to turn to Muammar Gaddafi.
While the stage was being set up for this performance, a lighting structure collapsed, striking a workman and leaving him with bad injuries to the chest and back. Yesterday, the producers visited him at home and presented him with a cheque for €10,000. This money is the 10 per cent of box office revenue which was meant originally for the Community Chest Fund. But after checking with the head of state, the producers decided to give it to the injured man instead, “because he is no doubt in need of greater help.” In other words, their payment to the injured man cost them nothing over and above what they had planned to give away already. Instead of carrying on with their planned donation to the Community Chest Fund and giving him a sum of money besides that, they just switched recipients.
Amazingly generous, wouldn’t you say? But it’s not about generosity. We are supposed to no longer live in a third-world, Victorian environment in which workers are injured severely on the job and their employers or contractors might decide, out of the kindness of their heart, to give them an ex gratia donation, calling in the press to show off about it. There are laws about these matters. Any worker injured in such circumstances is entitled to compensation, even if he has to sue for it. A collapsing lighting structure is not an act of God, but failure of man. It is unclear whether the injured man should be suing the contractor for which he worked, or the producers who commissioned the contractor and provided the working environment, or both of those. Either way, that donation made at no additional expense to the producers looks to me like a way of fending off a civil suit for damages.
It looks like we still have a long way to go in the league of workers’ rights and safety in the workplace, if we still accept as read that compensation for injury is a matter of voluntary and ex gratia ‘gifts’ from the individuals who, in more developed societies, would have been sued immediately. I wonder how hard Tony Zarb and his General Workers Union are working to change this mentality, or whether they are far too busy running their own businesses and selling cruises through Orange Travel.
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Salwa Bugaighis, the Libyan human rights campaigner and lawyer who played a role in the overthrowing of Muammar Gaddafi, has been killed by men who broke into her Benghazi home and shot and stabbed her. The same men abducted her husband, who has not been seen since. Bugaighis was a highly vocal advocate for a more contemporary role for women in Libyan society.
A spokesman for Amnesty International said of her murder: “The shocking, ruthless killing of Salwa Bugaighis robs Libyan civil society of one of its most courageous and esteemed figures. But sadly, she is by no means the first activist struck down during the political violence that has plagued the country since the uprising and its aftermath.”
Bugaighis campaigned for a quota for women in the new Libyan parliament, and for the right of women to choose whether or not they wished to wear the veil. For all of this she earned the disfavour of the Muslim Brotherhood, and their ire was made worse when she said that Islamic sharia should be but one source of law for Libya’s constitution, and not the sole source. She was murdered shortly after posting photographs on the internet showing herself voting in last Wednesday’s general election, which attracted a turnout of just 18% of the electorate.
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