Caritas Malta, which works extensively with the poor and disenfranchised, has proposed that the mandatory minimum wage be raised from €158 to €180. This has met, as with the last such proposal, with objections from employers, who say quite rightly that the increase in payroll costs will have to be passed on to the consumer, raising inflation, diminishing price competitiveness and spurring redundancies. The overall effect will be rising unemployment and, contrary to the well-meant aim of the exercise, more people taking home less money.
I’m a great one for believing that it is the market which should determine how much people are paid. People with skills that are essential to high-demand businesses but who are in short supply are paid a great deal more than average. Twenty years ago, graphic designers took home relatively large salaries, as design had not yet made the transition from laborious and time-consuming manual processes, but demand for advertising and marketing collateral was on a steep upward curve in the first real consumer boom since the 1960s. Then when design turned digital, the price of computers plummeted and training became available to more people, the market was flooded with designers and only the best and proven ones, working independently and not for an employer, began earning a significant amount. Today, it’s information technology professionals, operating in a market where demand for their services exceeds supply, who can pretty much name their price. But that will eventually level off, too.
Of course, it’s not enough to have skills and abilities which are in high demand but short supply. Those skills must also be essential to making money for your employer. Where making money is not a factor for the largest employer in the field, as with state education and healthcare, wages and salaries are not pushed up. That’s why nurses and teachers are not paid as much or more than IT workers.
Caritas Malta’s motives, in proposing a new minimum wage level, are good and well-intentioned. I know that for a fact, because I have discussed the matter with Monsignor Victor Grech, who runs the operation, and we share similar concerns about poverty and the inability of increasing numbers of families, at the lower end of the socio-economic scale, to make ends meet. We are in agreement, for example, that a major contributing factor is the widespread absence, in the socio-economic groups most dependent on social benefits and the minimum wage, of even the most basic cooking and food preparation skills. Though it is possible to feed a family inexpensively and well, through the application of those skills, the usual scenario is that in the absence of those skills, the wrong sort of food is bought: processed, pre-prepared, and delivering the double whammy of lacking nutrients while eating up the family budget.
There are those who believe that dependency on this ‘poor people’s food’ – which ironically is relatively pricey – is the result of women having to take on paid employment outside the home. Not so, for it is more than possible for people to work and cook too, and at the higher end of the socio-economic scale, where there is more health and value for money awareness, cooking from scratch takes place every day even when both adults work outside the home.
Others say that cooking skills have been ‘lost’ in the socio-economic groups that are most under financial stress and subject to poverty. But this is wrong. The truth is that among the most financially besieged classes, cooking skills never existed at all, so there were none to pass down the generations to begin with. That is why, when the financial lot of the next generation improves with better education and higher-paid work, the individuals involved have to make a determined and conscious decision to set about learning cookery.
If they have insufficient interest or motivation, they will keep right on cooking poor and unhealthy meals, or have their budget go on pre-prepared food. The reason why cookery skills are virtually non-existent among the recent descendants of the Maltese urban working-class and the rural poor should be obvious, but isn’t because of all the myths with which we like to feed our soul, about the great and mythical meals of past generations. The harsh reality is that if you never have food, or have very little and always unvaried, you never learn how to cook.
The development of cooking skills depends on the availability of ingredients and more specifically, on the availability of food. People who slaughtered a chicken once a year at Christmas, and who could never afford meat, don’t learn how to cook chicken in a hundred different ways or how to select, buy and use different cuts of meat. People who never owned an oven and had to pay the baker to roast their dishes on special occasions don’t learn how to bake or how to prepare roast meals that cannot be entrusted to the benign neglect of a village baker and his oven. People who owned only one cooking-pot and had only one flame – a spirit-burner or a ‘kenur’ – just threw all the ingredients they had into it and let them stew and boil.
The rural poor lived off stale bread and whatever vegetables they could get out of the fields, stewed together in the one family pot. The urban poor lived off stale bread and whatever they could scrounge or beg – including leftovers from military messes and convents – or buy for the odd penny. Why else do you think corned beef is a staple ingredient in the cookery, rather than the sandwiches, of the descendants of the Maltese urban poor? It is used in recipes where the ingredient should really be minced meat, even now when minced meat is cheap and everyone can buy it. We like to blame it on ‘the British’, but the reality is that the British don’t include corned beef in their cooking. They use minced beef or lamb.
But enough about one of my favourite subjects: I got a little carried away there and left no space to tackle what are the real enemies of financial survival among the socio-economic groups dependent on the minimum wage: smoking and gambling. Smoking and gambling are the real killers, consuming a great part of the household income. The worst of it is that they are taken for granted by the households suffering from this kind of blight, and not seen as problems to be tackled and eradicated, but rather as difficulties to be worked around. The woman whose low-paid husband smokes two packets a day and gambles whatever money he has access to will not lay down the law and deliver an ultimatum. And sometimes, even if she does so it delivers no results. She will take on a poorly paid job herself to earn back the money he is spending on cigarettes and gambling. Sometimes, it is the wife who smokes and gambles. If the minimum wage is raised in situations like this, we know where the money will go.
When people who earn relatively little money are addicted to smoking and gambling, these cease to be nasty habits and constitute a major social problem. They are an affliction to the family. Before there is a proper study of just how much of the income of minimum-wage earners goes on cigarettes and gambling – and this will be difficult because in the latter case especially, people lie even to their spouses – we cannot have a proper discussion about poverty and raising the minimum wage. These are the sorts of problems that are rendered worse, not made better, by throwing more money at them.
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