They say that August is the silly season. I think it’s the months leading up to the general election. The prospect of an election propels people into all kinds of silliness: postponing decisions, procrastinating, panicking about clashes with Election Day or the electoral campaign. The phrase “life goes on” doesn’t exist. Maybe we should stop going into panic mode. I know the thought of lurching from the current stability and positive economic situation, to Prime Minister Sant jerking from one sudden notion to another is a little bit frightening (well, a lot frightening, actually), but the thing to do is to keep calm, plan not to vote for him or to vote Against The Others, and then keep your fingers crossed that if the worse comes to the worst, and enough people decide to choose their government like they choose their football team, instead of using their brains, there might be another deus ex machina as there was in 1998.

Funny how people seem to have forgotten already how they rushed to get rid of him after just 22 months, he was so chaotic and incompetent. Ah, but change for the sake of change, instead of for something more efficient or pleasant, or sticking with the better option that you have already – that will always be a human failing. If otherwise sensible people will swap their lovely spouses and comfortable homes for a life of upheaval and financial problems with somebody new (because they need a change), then you can’t expect that people won’t do the same with the government. This election will be interesting because there are those who are planning to swap something old for something even older – tried, tested, been there, done that, and rejected three times over, twice in a general election and once in a referendum. I can’t wait.

* * *

First prize for electoral season silliness has to go to the Maltasong Board, which has kept us amused and entertained with its shenanigans over the years, from screeching, all-talons-bared fights with rivals, to airport showdowns, floods of tears, and the chairman being asked to name his favourite singer and coming up with the name of one famous lady and the surname of another. And let’s not forget the fabulous outfits: the pink cat-suits, bullfighter get-ups and prancing prats who are supposed to light our fire but do the opposite.

In the novel The Long Firm, about the London gangster scene in the 1960s, a social worker goes to visit a gang boss in prison, all done up in a new outfit and hairstyle, and is met with the insult: “What the hell are you wearing? You look like a Maltese ponce.” A ponce is a pimp, the one thing the Maltese were famous for in those days, other than dealing in drugs and worshipping their mothers while treating all other women like dogs. I was reminded of that a few weeks ago when the BBC showed the film of the book, including that line. Maybe now it’s time for a new insult: “What the hell are you wearing? You look like a Maltese singer.”

The Maltasong Board earns its Electoral Silliness Medal by announcing solemnly that it will hold the Song for Europe Festival in January “for fear of clashing with an election campaign”. Yes, but then won’t it clash with the January sales? “In view of the strong hearsay that a general election could be held in February or March, we did not want to risk holding the festival in the middle of the campaign,” Maltasong’s chairman Robert Abela told the newspapers, behaving as though it was the most important event in the national calendar, possibly more important even than the competition to choose the next government and prime minister.

I’m surprised that it isn’t the government that has been asked to kindly not hold an election in February so as not to interrupt the Song for Europe proceedings. Oh, what a flap! I can just picture the headless-chicken activity – as singers and their ‘consultants’ rush around in a haze of hair-spray, tacky streetwalker outfits and hideous Maltese-ponce get-ups. Marelli! It’s in January! X’Krismiss se jkollna!

* * *

I am a big fan of Air Malta and its desperate attempts to keep us rock-dwellers connected to civilisation. I choose Air Malta over any other airline, even the more comfortable ones, whenever I can, because the way I see things is that if we all rush off to the competition and Air Malta folds, then we’re pretty much – oh dear, I almost used a bad word there. No other airline is going to come here and fill the gaps on flights where money isn’t made, just to save us from the Pantelleria predicament.

That said, the airline sets my teeth on edge with the way it treats its clients when there are delays or cancelled flights, and it might be my imagination, but there seem to be more and more of these. Passengers are treated like cattle, and rather than being told what’s happening by an apologetic Air Malta representative, they have to go out and hunt down information.

But the biggest gripe of all is with the way that Air Malta is handling the pilot situation. I don’t know whether this increasing inability to stick to its schedule, leave on time, or fly the flights that people have booked and paid for has anything to do with the pilot problem, but they had better get a grip on the situation before things take a bigger turn for the worse.

Air Malta is somehow keeping its act together – which is why the act occasionally falls apart – with the barest minimum number of pilots. You could call it an ‘emergency’ number of pilots, if you wish. They are flying on a routine basis the maximum number of hours that the law allows – but that maximum number is for extraordinary circumstances only. Experienced pilots who have trained at great expense are leaving Air Malta to join airlines in which the pay and conditions are far superior.

Air Malta has issued a statement describing this as normal in “these days of increased worker mobility”. Excuse me for pointing this out, but it’s normal for people in their 20s and childless people in the 30s to hop from one country to another in search of better prospects and a more exciting life. When you’re in your 30s with a family and a home you’re paying for, or in your 40s and settled, you do it because you have to, or because you’re damned unhappy where you are. It has nothing to do with the temptations of worker mobility.

Despite the knocks to the airline industry in the aftermath of the World Trade Centre terrorist attack, and the failure of several smaller airlines, there is no great mass of unemployed pilots out there, who are prepared to come to Malta for what is, to a pilot, peanuts pay. So Air Malta is having to replace its experienced pilots with new pilots who take up the Malta job only to rack up their compulsory flying hours before going back home and getting a better job for more money. How do I know this? I spoke to some of the pilots, who are steaming.

It’s all about demand and supply, but we know that already through the doctors situation. The difference is that the doctors in our state hospitals are tied into the civil service pay structure, and Air Malta pilots are not. In the private sector, if you need people then you pay them what they’re worth. Salaries go up or down according to demand for those particular skills and qualifications, and the supply of them. If the country were flooded with unemployed pilots knocking on doors for jobs, then their salaries would go down, Air Malta would pay even greater peanuts than it does already, and nobody would question the economics or the morality of it.

Some years ago, when the prime minister’s salary was Lm9,000, designers experienced in media work were being headhunted from one advertising agency studio to another, for salaries that far exceeded the prime minister’s. They were among Malta’s highest-paid professionals. That’s because there was lots of work and not enough trained people to do it. None of the bigger studios told the designers: “Bloody hell, I’m not paying you that kind of money. Go and work somewhere else.” Those which couldn’t afford to pay lost their employees and their business to others. It’s called the real world.

Air Malta is desperate for more pilots, it should be extremely keen to hang on to those that are still working for it, and pilots living in Malta are in extremely short supply. The rules of the private sector dictate that in a dangerous situation like this, the company should immediately make salaries more attractive and turn somersaults in its attempts at making pilots want to work there – because without pilots, there is no Air Malta. The business is built on the pilots.

Ah, but the rules of the private sector do not apply to Air Malta. We learnt that a long time ago. Oddly, while the one sector that shouldn’t be run on the lines of a private company – state broadcasting – has been instructed to do exactly that, Air Malta continues to be run like an offshoot of the drydocks, where private sector rules do not apply despite it being a business. It’s that curious hybrid: a state business.

Air Malta is counting on the likelihood of the older pilots not wanting to move their homes and families lock, stock and barrel to another country in search of work. That’s not a great way to run a business, because you never know, they might do just that. And serious businesses do not count on their key employees staying with them because they have no choice. They know that they will work best if they want to be there. You can’t build team spirit or increase productivity if those who work for you hate your guts and feel used and resentful.

And if nobody fresh and new wants to work for you, and younger pilots are rushing off to apply for posts with Emirates or British Airways, then ding-dong! That was an alarm bell. But I almost forgot: alarm bells don’t go off in state businesses, where the “you’re lucky you have a job” attitude continues to hold sway. It’s not the pilots who are lucky to have a job with Air Malta: it’s the myriad hangers-on, chaff and useless persons who were engaged for political reasons, and who are bumping up the pay-roll bill without adding value to the business. It really makes no sense at all to have 55 miserable and resentful pilots flying your planes and plotting an escape route to a better employer, while you spend your money on the peripherals, or on staff engaged by some long-forgotten minister on behalf of some even more long-forgotten galoppin.

The fact is this: is Air Malta paying its pilots enough to retain them and to keep them happy in their work – an essential factor that enlightened employers never overlook? No, it is not. Its pilots are mutinying. This is a lot more serious than, say, a mutiny by its baggage handlers. Lose one baggage handler, gain another. Lose your pilots, and you’re in a fix.

Air Malta says that its pilots are among the best-paid people in Malta. That’s hardly the point. Salaries are fixed – or should be fixed – by demand and supply. The reasoning that an Air Malta pilot should be happy with Lm15,616 gross salary – and that includes all perks and ancillaries – just because lots of other people earn between Lm4,000 and Lm10,000 is nonsense. We had enough of that kind of talk from the socialists, and we certainly don’t need to hear it from Air Malta in 2007.

Salaries are set according to what people are worth, how much the business needs them, and how easily they can be replaced if they leave. They are not measured against the salaries of other people in completely different sectors. If Air Malta is haemorrhaging pilots because they’re unhappy, and if it runs the risk of further haemorrhage, and if it is struggling to replace experienced pilots with other experienced pilots who are not Maltese, and if Maltese pilots are heading off to rival airlines, then it has a serious problem on its hands, and the serious problem is not being caused by the pilots. It’s being caused by people who are trying to run a business like a socialist state ‘enterprise’.

Please don’t try to tell me that Lm15,616 before tax, is anywhere near a suitable salary for somebody who has undergone years of difficult and expensive training, in a sector to which not many are attracted and for which not many are suitable, and who is responsible for not just the safety but the very lives of hundreds of people every day. A situation in which first officers take home about Lm1,000 a month, and captains less than Lm2,000 a month, for flying equipment worth many millions containing the lives of hundreds of people is beyond belief. It is shocking.

Give those pilots a break, for heaven’s sake. We don’t want the planes on which we are passengers, flown by unhappy people with the earnings of a time-share tout or a garage mechanic paid in cash. Get rid of some other people and use that money to pay the pilots. Oh, but those other people are wrapped up in the General Workers Union, aren’t they, and we don’t want to have to deal with Tony and strikes across the board, do we? So we’ll sacrifice the pilots instead, and then maybe a baggage handler can fly the planes.