There is a new, widespread, pernicious atmosphere in work places now. Gone are the times when a job was for life, with a binding contract that nothing but death could terminate. In any job today, there is a clear preference for limited, time-bound contracts or part-time work, outsourcing, easier hire and fire terms.

This is the case not just at the lower end of the social spectrum but even in jobs for which one expects graduates to apply. Any expression of surprise or shock is always met with the same reaction: Take it or leave it!

This is the way the world is going, many might say, and yes, this is the way the world is indeed going. The past years have shown that countries with an easier hire and fire structure, like the US and even the UK, have registered more growth than countries, such as Germany with a heavier net of social concern. In fact, this is what led Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to come up with that controversial reform programme of his, which in a way did start to record some growth in the German economy, although not quick enough to save him.

Maybe, it is true, even small Malta needed to lift some of the restrictions that could be perceived as hampering growth. To be exact, the present state of the country’s finances cannot be ascribed to this heavy social net, as it has other very different causes. If one considers unions to be a nuisance, this new system will render unions irrelevant, as it has done in other countries, but one is not sure whether this is an improvement or not, even after acknowledging all the mistakes made by unions.

But this new approach on the shop floor has now become endemic, a complete, blatant, disregard for worker and human rights, people sacked at whim, people forced to work for longer hours ‘or else’, people forced to do work that are in no way related to their job, people constantly threatened they are going to lose their job, plus other worse consequences such as favouritism, different packages for different people, and so on.

More importantly, anecdotal evidence confirms that jobs are still given using the ‘who you know, not what you know’ principle. People send applications that more often than not are not even acknowledged and many times people who apply are told that the position had been filled long ago.

One could argue here that there are various remedies open to people with complaints about the way they have been treated, from the Labour Office (or whatever it is called today) to the Gender Equality watchdog, but in most cases the priority for most people is to get a job, and the widespread perception is that only those with time to waste and money to burn can afford to go for such judicial remedies.

This has become endemic; the country knows what is going on but rarely speaks about it. This situation also exists in many big companies where the unions are present, but the unions have learnt they cannot use a big stick (unless the owner is the government itself!), let alone where there are no unions and mostly no rules. This is also the case not just in employment of people without skills, where the employer can pick and choose from a ready reservoir of available workforce – what with people who lost their job, all the way down to illegal immigrants and all the rest in the black economy – but also in jobs where people with skills, or university degrees are chosen. We sometimes speak about university graduates registering for work, with levels that are lower than the average in many other European countries, but we rarely ask what, logically, the next question should be: are the university graduates being employed in jobs suited to their qualifications or are they employed in mostly humdrum clerical jobs anybody with half their qualifications could do?

All this is a mistake, a hugely expensive one. First of all, people react to increasingly hard conditions at work by becoming harder themselves: consider the number of people flitting from one job to another, simply dropping out of a job, and, worse, undermining their own job by the various subtle ways an employee always has. The next time you enter a shop and are ‘welcomed’ by a morose salesperson, think: That person might be unhappy at work and is reacting in this manner because of the way the employer enforces work.

There is little or no commitment today to one’s place of work, one’s job, one’s employer. The thing is: the real cost of an employee is not just the wage the employee gets, but also the training received and the value-added that a happy employee can give to the job. When the turnover in employees starts to spin out of control, it may be due to the employees being headhunted by rival companies or attracted by higher salaries, but it could also be a reflection of the real state of affairs down at shop floor level.

Nor should the fact that the country has adopted less stringent regulations instead of the former regime, lead employers to think that the availability of willing workers, Maltese or especially foreigners, should allow them to treat their own Maltese compatriots like dirt.