With some leaders continuing to shoot from the hip, and people at work beginning to believe that they are in precarious employment because their immediate supervisor has refused their request for vacation leave, let’s take a breather. The Classical Oxford Dictionary defines ‘precarious’ as ‘not securely held or in position, dangerously, likely to fall or collapse, dependent on chance, uncertain’. Quite rightly, local trade unions have highlighted the issue of precarious work. Leaders of the three political parties have also referred to precarious work at various political activities. From what has been reported, I believe it is necessary to qualify and quantify both abuse and precarious work. Abusing workers’ rights and precarious work are two different things altogether.

The recently published report From Precarious Work to Decent Work highlights how precarious work has spread around the world due to the economic and financial recession. Indeed, the International Labour Organisation’s symposium last year on policies and regulations to combat precarious work had a timely topic. With the advent of another global crisis, precarious work has negatively affected millions of workers worldwide.

Precarious work took workers around the world by surprise when the unexpected happened. After the massive collapse of long-standing worldwide financial institutions, a wide range of austerity measures was introduced in many countries. In some countries more than in others, workers had to shoulder the weight of many austerity measures. While social benefits in large economies were slashed to the minimum possible, in other countries a wide range of social benefits were stopped completely, leaving many vulnerable beneficiaries out in the cold. As a result of this world financial disaster, the economic and social landscape will never be the same again. 

Many governments around the world had to bail out banks and other financial institutions to further ease the financial squeeze on people’s pockets. Millions of people around the world lost their hard-earned savings. While this economic and financial tragic event was unfolding, worldwide international regulatory bodies were caught fast asleep. The fat cats did not smell the rat in their own back yard.  

The report also highlights the fact that, worldwide, unimaginable numbers of workers and youth workers suffer from precarious, insecure, uncertain, and unpredictable working conditions. Unemployment figures alone are a cause for concern, but even so they fail to account for the larger majority of people who work, but who do not have a decent job, with a decent wage, a secure future, social protection and access to rights. The universality and dimension of the problem call for coordinated and comprehensive action at international level. 

During this global financial crisis, which many countries have been experiencing since 2007, thousands of workers from the public sector have been made redundant. Workers’ rights have been eroded, while wages and salaries have been reduced by various but substantial percentages in many countries. A reduction in the minimum wage has also been introduced in some countries. Luckily, the local workforce was spared such draconian measures. However, one must understand and even appreciate that this did not happen by chance. The government led a coordinated plan of action to protect productive jobs and create new ones at enterprise level, and this plan has been a success.   

While local trade unions and officials from the department of labour must continue to bring to light entrepreneurs who take advantage of their workers, it is most unjust to claim that precarious work locally has spread to high proportions.

Before jumping to conclusions, one must not make the deliberate mistake – due to political motives – that workers with different contracts of work are in precarious employment. Part-time work, definite contract employment, casual employment and many other forms of workers’ contracts do not necessarily mean precarious employment.

These contracts of employment have been substantially improved during the last decade to better safeguard workers and will certainly continue to be used by any employer, irrespective of the party in government. The recently adopted new legislation on self-employment contracts has been warmly welcomed by those involved in conducting healthy industrial relations.

With the introduction of a wide range of family-friendly measures within the public service, many different employment contracts may become more useful and necessary. Once the private sector takes on board the same level of family-friendly measures presently enjoyed by public service workers, different work contracts will become more than useful to any entrepreneur, large or small, to be able to sustain the high level of family-friendly benefits for his/her workers.   

These work contracts may be different but not necessarily precarious. It has become a reality that, in the labour market, there are no jobs for life anymore. Job mobility has become the norm rather than the exception and this will continue to increase in a flexible labour market.  

Precarious work will only be defeated by empowering people at work with life-long training and helping workers acquire the necessary and better skills and capabilities needed to climb the career ladder in a competitive labour market.

Perhaps political leaders should insist that wages and salaries are commensurate with the responsibility people have and the work they carry out and should not make promises to workers that the labour market cannot sustain. Increased salaries, improved wages and better conditions of work can only be achieved if the national economy is ticking over and if private companies that are driven by the bottom line can stand local and foreign competition. Since 2007, Malta has managed to be one of the top six countries in the world when it comes to creating new employment opportunities. Some policies and directives adopted locally must have been right, otherwise this high rate of employment would not have been achieved.

Giving an inaccurate impression to people at work of what constitutes precarious work is not fair. Where it exists, let us call a spade a spade. Abuse should not be tolerated nor accepted at any level. We should not speak about ‘precarious work’ when we need to speak about is abuse, and where precarious work does not exist, let us desist from making politically motivated conjectures. Political parties should refrain from making cosmetic, artificial and empty promises to workers, and governments in waiting should explain their policies for the creation of new productive employment.