The staff of the five-star Crowne Plaza hotel, which the government recently sold to a private developer, were in for something of a shock when they turned up for work on 8 January and were grouped into teams of builders and painters, plumbers and carpenters, electricians, seamstresses and security guards.

The 120-odd employees, many of whom are qualified and highly experienced in the tourism industry, who had been assured that the site’s new owners would be retaining them once it was handed over, are now engaged in various forms of manual labour such as dangerous demolition and construction work.

Employees who contacted The Malta Independent on Sunday expressed their frustration at this state of affairs, and their concerns that they are undertaking dangerous work without the necessary training, experience, supervision or even proper safety equipment.

With all the talk of the need to improve the country’s tourism product, it is ironic that the five-star hotel’s skilled, experienced and qualified employees are now engaged in manual labour as a result of the government sale, which brought in the princely sum of Lm23.3 million on the sale itself and another Lm1.1 million in stamp duty.

After a number of parliamentary questions tabled by the Opposition in the prelude to the sale, which had questioned the future of the employees once the site was sold, the government had provided a dubious sort of assurance in the form of the promise of sale agreement stipulating that the new owners would retain the hotel’s employees.

But with no assurance of the type of work to be provided, the new owners, according to workers speaking to this newspaper, are now making them do heavy construction work.

Waiters are carrying building blocks instead of trays and chefs are now building walls instead of main courses. One particularly gruelling and dangerous job detail involved the demolition of four storeys of ceilings in order to make way for a new staircase and lift shaft.

Contacted yesterday for his version of events and about the employees’ future employment conditions, the site’s effective owner, George Muscat, tersely commented, “If they (the employees) have a problem, they should be telling me, not you,” and abruptly hung up.

The employees are, however, certain that their new “job” is not of a temporary nature but a permanent one since only a small portion of the site will be retained as a small hotel catering for students.

If the employees were not as distressed as they are, the list of past and present job descriptions, seen by this newspaper, resembles more a plot line from Faulty Towers than an employment plan.

Employees who had served individually as restaurant managers, head chefs, duty managers, stewards and supervisors, demi chef de partie, head waiters, commis and sous chefs have now been assigned gruelling manual labour. Other workers, meanwhile, have been sent to work on other construction sites being developed by the company.

“Can you imagine a 60-year-old with 20 years’ experience in the hospitality industry now having to do construction work?” one employee questioned.

Making matters worse, the employees, completely inexperienced in construction work, have been given no training, supervision or even safety equipment with which to carry out their work. Workers, in fact, report that four injuries were sustained in the first week of their new work alone.

Employees speaking to this paper added that the Occupation Health and Safety Authority, after several reports from workers at the site, eventually paid them a visit this week, only to take down the names of six workers and warn them they would be fined if they were not using proper safety equipment the next time they were inspected.

Employees also expressed their frustration over the fact that, had they been simply laid off, they would have been entitled to unemployment benefits. But as matters stand, if they quit, as they believe they are being forced into doing by their new work description, they would not qualify for any such benefits.

But despite the hardships they have to put up with, they have decided to stand united, to “pull the same rope” and to not give in to what they believe is the new owner’s intention – for the employees to quit one-by-one, which would eventually release them from the obligation to retain the workers. “Every time a worker were to quit, the new owners would be saving some Lm6,000 a year,” one employee observed.

As members of the General Workers’ Union, the employees met with the union this weekend and industrial action at the site is expected to be announced in the immediate future.

In its heyday, the hotel was one of Malta’s finest, and several employees have been working there since it opened some 20 years ago. Owned by the government until December, the Crowne Plaza had been leased to and run by Air Malta. Last year, however, the airline informed the government it was no longer interested in running the hotel, citing financial losses and its restructuring programme aimed on concentrating on its core business of aviation.

The Malta Environment and Planning Authority had issued a development brief for the site and the new owners intend constructing close to 400 apartments where the hotel previously stood, itself a plan that is expected to be contested in the near future.