Martin Gatt is a 43-year-old assistant manager who used to work with a mid-sized shoe manufacturing company at Bulebel. The foreign-owned company had been in Malta since 1983, relocating here from the UK because of lower wages and very generous incentive schemes.

Martin had seen the company go through good times and bad. Coming in at the shop floor level and working his way up, he remembers earning hefty production bonuses as well as having his pay packet frozen for years.

Somehow the company always pulled through the bad patches. But this time there was nothing that could be done. In January of this year, the company president came down from the UK to announce to management and staff that the factory was relocating lock, stock and barrel to Morocco. The reason: wages there made the company more commercially viable on the global and European market.

When the announcement was made, a thick silence descended, punctured only by sniffles from around the room. Martin was separated with two kids to support. Like most men he knew, he was comfortable but always on a tight budget. Now he was unemployed for the first time in his life.

Driving home that day, life’s certainties started peeling off his mind and being, one by one. As he entered the Regional Road tunnel he thought about the light at the end of it. He cried for the first time since his father had died.

Paul Vella had been a fitter at Malta Shipbuilding for close to a decade. When government started the restructuring exercise, he made a decision: there was no way he was going to leave “government” employment. He was not about to take either the somma (sum of money), the early retirement scheme or any other bait the government was dangling to get him off its payroll.

Paul knew that, even with overtime shorn off, he could not top a Shipbuilding fitter’s pay in the cutthroat private sector world. And government was as likely to fire him as Elton John was likely to become the next pope.

So he hung on and ended up being “seconded” with a government department. The new work was no great shakes and it certainly did not allow him to exercise his considerable skills. But his pay remained good and he was still able to go home early enough to do a part-time job with his father-in-law. For Paul there was life after the death of his Shipbuilding job.

John Scerri’s story is shorter. He had been working on the assembly line at Interprint, a State-owned company, for a number of years. Government declared that the company was unsustainable and did something which, until recently, was deemed to be less likely to happen than Elton John’s boyfriend becoming pope: Interprint was closed down and John, along with all his colleagues, was left without a job.

Martin, Paul and John are fictitious but their stories are not. They are based on facts and representative of three realities which are allowed to co-exist in today’s Malta as if everything is hunky dory on the industrial relations front.

The two gross injustices are obvious. First, why should Martin lose his job because the private company he worked for closed its door but, when Paul’s closed its doors, government got him another job to replace the one he lost? Why does government give the latter a right to lifetime employment that the market denies to the former?

Secondly, on what basis does the government decide which of the workers on its own payroll should be granted the right to lifetime employment and who should be denied the same right? Paul, who, incidentally, worked with a public company, which drained tens of millions of taxpayers’ money, got to keep a job while John who was in a comparable situation was fired. Why the two weights and two measures?

The injustice goes even deeper if one juxtaposes all this onto lifetime employment tenure in civil service. As far as I know, the government has justified the firing of Interprint employees with the rationale that the company is no longer viable. Fair enough, but why isn’t the same rationale used to justify massive layoffs to reduce the unsustainable size of the civil service? Why is the wastage of public funds not acceptable in one case but acceptable in the other? Does the nation have some sacrosanct obligation to keep paying a messaggier (messenger) for life even if his services are even more redundant than those of the Interprint employee recently fired by government? And while we are at it, do government agency workers have a somewhat emasculated right to employment compared to their civil service colleagues?

Today Maltese workers are effectively living in industrial apartheid. A private sector worker’s right to employment is determined exclusively by the market. That of a public sector employee is guaranteed for life by dint of colonial tradition. And within government there are employees who are more equal than others

None of the three political parties has put this gross injustice on their agenda. Too many votes are at risk, I suppose. More surprisingly, neither have the unions. The GWU is even reinforcing this industrial apartheid by protecting lifetime employment in the public sector from one corner of its mouth and accepting – because it has no alternative – the mercilessness of the market in the private sector from the other. So much for all that talk of social justice and solidarity.

There is only one solution to this messy morass of injustices. All private and public sector employees should be treated equally. The hire and fire principle used by the private sector today should be adopted by the public sector with all its implications.

Only when government takes this bold step would it be legitimate to speak of a country that gives equal opportunities to all. Only then would the benefits and drawbacks of the market be enjoyed and suffered by all.

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