The Economy Minister threw a press conference – we’re talking about somebody who parties relentlessly, so ‘throw’ seems like the appropriate verb to use, even though there were no drinks – yesterday with his cabinet colleague, the Education Minister. It goes without saying that they made an unimpressive pair, more so when Evarist Bartolo revealed that he hasn’t quite got over the fact that Malta joined the European Union against his wishes. “Half of all jobs are going to foreigners and not to Maltese,” he said. That’s right, “foreigners” – because we still think and talk in terms of Maltin u barranin, our Schengen zone status and our zipping all over Europe with our euros notwithstanding.
We can’t do anything about it, he said. It’s all about freedom of movement. Indeed, it is – just as when his two daughters moved to other countries in Europe to work and study, both in a capacity that would have been impossible, financially and in terms of permission to work, had so many of not voted against their father’s wishes. When grumbling about how many foreigners are taking up jobs in Malta, it might occur to him to mention how many Maltese are working in those foreigners’ countries right now. How easy it is for us to forget that it cuts both ways.
The Education Minister said that more ‘foreigners’ have been coming to seek work in Malta since the start of the financial crisis in countries like Spain and Greece. Of course they are. That is the whole point of freedom of movement of labour in the European Union. Maltese people are not leaving to work elsewhere because of any financial crisis, but they are leaving in droves all the same, and have been doing so since 2004, especially the younger generation.
They are leaving because opportunities in Malta are really limited, and it is not just because of the size of the place and the small population. They’re limited because Maltese social culture is not dynamic or creative. It kills or stifles innovation and creativity. Does the Education Minister believe they should be gated and kept in Malta against their will? He’s that sort of old Communist who probably thinks that what is sauce for his daughters is not sauce for everyone else’s. His daughters should be free to pop about Europe working and studying, but everybody else’s daughters should stick to working in their own country.
He did say, grudgingly, that it is “positive” (because we’re not allowed to be negative, remember) that Malta has a global workforce. And while I understood what he meant, I didn’t think it positive at all that the Education Minister would use the term ‘global workforce’ to mean something else entirely. The global workforce is the entire workforce of the globe/world. It does not mean people from many countries working in Malta.
He was correct in saying that the main problem lies in the skills gap between what Maltese people can offer and what employers require. The trouble is, though, that he sees training-up the unskilled not as a means to get them into work, but as a means of getting them to take jobs instead of ‘foreigners’. At least, that is what it sounded like to me.
And he won’t say out loud what the real problem is, because now he is in government and responsible for doing something about it. But before he got into government, Evarist Bartolo wooed your average (very average, as in largely brainless) Sliema-type voter with all his talk about how English needs to be used more, how more has to be done in English, how important English is, and so on. Now, apparently, it’s not so important anymore to the Labour Party, beyond the Prime Minister and his Energy Minister flinging some phrases around in public because their Maltese is so bad, though not as bad as their English, that they can’t express themselves in complete sentences in that language.
Yes, Evarist Bartolo knows what the real problem is. The real problem is that almost nobody in Malta can speak or write idiomatic English. And yes, I do mean almost nobody, because many of those who think they know the language in reality know just the Maltese version of it, which isn’t proper English at all because it uses different syntax and a severely truncated lexicon. Because this very basic form of English is widespread, we delude ourselves into thinking that English is spoken/written in Malta. It simply is not. Maltese people literally panic when they are asked to write anything in English; they just can’t do it, beyond a couple of comments on the internet. How useful is that to an employer? Not very.
The second greatest problem, as Evarist Bartolo will know, is that Maltese people are in the main complete strangers to normal, civilised interaction and basic good manners. This is not just about ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ or being polite. Knowing how to behave is essential because it means you instinctively know how to deal with a given situation. That is what employers look for. If we are honest, we will have to admit that the interactions of Maltese people between themselves – even those who are meant to be better than that – can be really quite primitive. I find myself making allowances all the time “because this is Malta”, and then I tick myself off for that and say, “This isn’t Malta; this is sheer awful manners.” It has led me to put the phone down permanently on a couple of people, but you find yourself making those sorts of allowances, or worse, when you find yourself going down the same route to survive it, it’s time to call a halt.
Here’s your campaign, Minister: basic good manners and more than basic good English. People go a long way with just that.
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