Air Malta, for either better or worse depending on your employment status with the airline, appears to be making the move from operating on a virtual wing and a prayer to an even keel.

And the staff restructuring exercise which aims to entice close to half the airline’s workers with still undisclosed early retirement options will be a painful, but necessary one - necessary to keep the other half of the workforce in employment as otherwise all jobs at Air Malta would certainly have been headed for the chopping block.

While the details of the offer have not yet been disclosed, it is hoped they will be adequately attractive for enough staff to accept, move on and find new jobs or businesses to invest in, as many of the former Malta Shipyards workers have now done.

Additionally, the fact that Air Malta’s new management team convened Friday’s staff meeting to explain the redundancies could very well be interpreted as an indicative sign that the European Commission is on the verge of formally confirming its essential and all-determining support of the bailout plan for the heavily beleaguered national airline.

At any rate, it is positive to note that the rot at the airline has been stopped dead in its tracks – in terms of its bloated staff complement as well as in terms of the very questionable freebies the airline had a tradition of giving out to former Air Malta chairmen, board members and as well as both serving and retired politicians.

That was a decision taken by Air Malta and the Prime Minister made the follow up announcement last night that he was also cancelling all free flights for himself, the President, all former prime ministers and presidents. And high time that was done too.

It is also hoped, although these have not been confirmed, that the government’s efforts to redeploy Air Malta employees in the public service are successful – not only in terms of retaining those people in gainful employment, but also in terms of such redeployments being aimed at areas where they are truly needed and where they can continue to be productive.

Now that the tidal wave of migrant arrivals has, at least for the time being, appeared to have dwindled to a ripple, Malta can now refocus its attention in the sphere from pure crisis management to properly integrating the people that Malta is hosting.

We do not intend that efforts along such lines are not being made, or that the whole of the population has a problem with other races. What we intend is that racism is still very much alive and kicking despite the fact that the more antagonistic anti-migration groups that had reared their ugly heads some years back now appear to have crawled back into the woodwork, their clichéd arguments seemingly no longer resounding with any significant part of the populace.

But the fact of the matter is that there is a whole lot more that can be done.

It is an everyday occurrence but allow us to highlight a recent incident this editorialist was involved in. It was the middle of the afternoon near Hal Far’s Tent City and a young coloured immigrant family - a mother and a father with an infant in a pushchair – was waiting to cross the road at a zebra crossing.

Approaching the crossing, three cars were seen speeding through without paying any heed to the pedestrians trying to legally cross the road at the appropriate spot, certainly a traffic violation warranting a citation but nothing out of the ordinary.

But when this editorialist dutifully stopped at the zebra crossing he was pelted by a hail of racist-oriented abuse, which will not be repeated here for the sake of decency, from the vehicle behind him. The rest of the incident is quite irrelevant but the point is that these were not people urinating in public places or who were involved in some other act that rubs our western cultural norms the wrong way - this was a family merely attempting to cross the road at a zebra crossing.

And the fact that the elicitation of such reaction would be unfathomable had the family been Maltese or of some other European descent leads one to the already foregone conclusion that the only sure fire way to well and truly stamp out racism is through real integration.

We deal with the issue of integration in detail in our news pages, as well as with Friday’s vigil for the African migrant slain last year by a Paceville bouncer. We will conclude with a quote from the Migrants’ Network for Equality from the vigil:

“We are afraid that what is happening in Paceville reflects a general atmosphere of hostility towards Africans. This can be felt in various other situations such as the workplace, rental of apartments, in public places, and through certain comments and behaviour that we experience in our everyday life. It is this atmosphere that makes a tiny minority of violent racists feel that they can act with impunity.”

Let us not - through this non-aggressive hostility that perhaps those dishing it out are unaware of themselves - be the cart that holds these bad apples, keeps them safe and allows their rot to spread.