On the eve of the last general election, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi sent a personalised letter to all employees at Air Malta. It was a personal commitment, in writing, that no one would lose their job.

Coming from the Prime Minister, the letter bore the hallmark of a written contract that in effect described how Dr Gonzi would be entitled to their vote against an assurance of security of tenure of their employment.

Many of them believed the contents. I remember employees at Air Malta I personally know flattered by the attention shown by the Prime Minister himself, all visibly satisfied and relieved.

Lest we forget, the company had already shed around 500 workers since 2004 by virtue of other retirement schemes offered by the company under the patrimony of former chairmen of the airline. So it was already evident to the company that there were too many employees on its books. Yet the Prime Minister pretended to ignore this fact by reassuring a concerned workforce that their jobs were secure. It was clear which way the majority of the employees’ votes would go. Indeed Dr Gonzi scraped through to Castille by a fistful of votes on that fateful day of March 2008.

But for another 500 employees at the national airline, who, despite the Prime Minister’s assurances, had to pack up and leave their jobs post-election 2008, it should now be clear to them that Dr Gonzi’s guarantee wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. And as far as the rest - who will stay on - are concerned, they now know that they will carry on with their job at the airline for other reasons than those mentioned in Dr Gonzi’s letter. They will be counting themselves very lucky.

Very soon the company will be ridding itself of 500 men and women in some way or other, but Dr Gonzi won’t be writing again to tell them how sorry he is to see them losing the same jobs he so jubilantly said he had secured for them four years ago, exactly nine days before the elections.

The company now has a foreign CEO who is doing exactly what former Maltese chairmen had been doing for a number of years – cutting down on the workforce, with one cardinal difference however - at four times their salaries! Christine Legarde, the current IMF chair, earns less than the current Air Malta CEO does. Not to mention the fact that no minister will now be comfortable with referring to the Prime Minister’s pre-electoral fantasies about security of tenure of jobs when confronting hard questions. When the going gets tough, ministers start acting like archipelagos of islands instead of one compact cabinet, employing an it’s-not-me-ask-the-guy-next-door sort of attitude.

I think it is appropriate that the salient part of Dr Gonzi’s letter to Air Malta employees be reproduced in my piece. The letter was sent to them on 25 February 2008, just nine days before election day. It read as follows –

‘On the 8th March you must make a decision. You must choose a government. You must choose a Prime Minister. And at the same time you must ensure that the sacrifices you made to keep Air Malta competitive are not lost. The best guarantee for Air Malta is economic growth and continued growth in employment in our country as happened during the last few years. So I invite you to vote for certainty and for a strong economy which are the guarantees for your work. I invite you to vote for the nationalist candidates.’

‘You must choose a Prime Minister...’ he had written. It was the GonziPN slogan at its very best, duping the recipients of that letter and of other letters that Dr Gonzi wrote to employees at other government-run companies. In three years they have all been closed down, wound up, liquidated, or privatised, with workers given voluntary redundancy or early retirement schemes.

GonziPN was the most effective, yet the most manipulative slogan imaginable. Now the chickens have come home to roost and Dr Gonzi will have to face the ire of Air Malta employees at the next general election.

Will the Prime Minister be sending letters again to Air Malta employees?

Dr Gulia is the Opposition’s Main Spokesman for Tourism and Air Malta