At this time of the year, even if the big demonstrations that used to be organised in European captals have greatly declined, the condition of workers still gets highlighted as an issue. The EU economy has largely recovered, but millions of workers and their families still live below the levels that were theirs prior to 2008.
Certainly, the working conditions of many people have become tougher, more precarious. Little can be done at a European level to correct for this over the short term. Meanwhile, digital technologies - as necessary as they are - could cause further declines in work opportunities.
Malta seems to have evaded these multiple pressures, although we might be showing excessive optimism when gauging improvements achieved in working conditions. It would be a good idea for the Labour movement to revive the debate it had launched some years back about the "living wage".
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JASON MICALLEF
With abject apologies to Salman Rushdie and all those who must have spent hours poring over the writings of Jason Micallef so that they could then indict them, I just cannot understand why they found them so disturbing. Micallef expressed views that you can agree or disagree with, but which are hardly out of this world.
Whoever found his approach offensive must still not have read articles by a learned pundit who in "The Times" regularly instructs us about the writings of Mrs Caruana Galizia. He teaches how nothing in her discourse should be considered as obnoxious or as undignified, as bullying or as based on hate speech, in the context of how in today's world, modern stylists express themselves in writing, even through a sense of exagerration. Nowhere Micallef came close to her model for how to "strongly" express your convictions.
If then, the plea against Micallef is that he has a public role and should watch out for what he says, the same argument holds for Archbishop Scicluna, who has no qualms about speaking his mind. Ironically, the people who want to remove Micallef and Scicluna from their positions seem to be the ones who are missing out on the truly wholesome meaning of "European" values.
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SPRING
One must seriously doubt whether the spring season still truly exists. In this country it was long ago squeezed between a winter that is rarely so cold, and a summer that is always bringing forward the date of its entry into force.
Apparently the same effect is spreading across the whole continent: a friend from central Europe mentioned how he too had noted that suddenly, the climate would change from days of deep freeze to one of high summer.
But perhaps, little has actually changed. It is just that I and whoever is making similar observations, have also been growing older. We hardly notice periods of transition like the weeks of spring because we know where they will be leading to. What we succeed to focus on are the beginning and end of a process, not what happens in between them.
30 April 2018