I really cannot understand why it took a big front page story in the Nationalist Party's Sunday newspaper, Il-Mument, a reader's comment which I uploaded as a post on my website, and a statement released by the Malta Employers Union yesterday, for the police and the authorities in general to take action against the boss (or bosses?)at the textile factory Leisure Clothing.

The situation is nothing short of shocking, and I find it very difficult to understand how this factory is permitted to operate under that ongoing system in the first place. How has this situation been ongoing for almost three decades with neither government nor opposition saying anything about it until now? This is not just about the abuse to which those people, and heaven knows how many before them, are allegedly subjected. This is also about the very fact that they are here, working in that factory, in the first place. This is a textiles factory, a place with sewing machines where clothes are made, not highly specialised labour for which no Maltese people are trained. In the concomitant period, hundreds of Maltese worked in textile factories, doing exactly the same work those Chinese labourers have been doing, though in situations where they were protected by their union and by Malta's labour laws. And isn't that just the point? Those Chinese slave-labourers are used so that their employers don't have to employ Maltese people at Maltese wages under Maltese conditions. Of course, they are obliged at law to provide those conditions to anybody who works for them, Maltese, Chinese or whatever - but the difference is that Chinese people don't know their rights under our laws, have been brought over from God alone knows what state of poverty in their home country, and are afraid of being abandoned to their own devices or sent back home if they stand up for themselves or try to claim any rights they discover they have.

Over the last few years, one textile factory after another has closed down in Malta - one of them, Denim Ltd, leaving hundreds of people unemployed - and all the while we had Leisure Clothing using the labour of imported Chinese workers. How was this permitted? How was Leisure Clothing allowed to bring people in to do work that could have been done by Maltese people, when so many Maltese people needed those very jobs? Something here really stinks, and stinks badly. While Maltese textile workers were made redundant and left looking for work, Chinese textile workers were brought in to Malta as though they had the freedom of movement of EU citizens, and before that, when our governments were so strict on the matter of work permits, demanding 101 guarantees that a Maltese person could not do the job, in came Chinese labourers from a world away to sew clothes that Maltese women were desperate to sew themselves.

Why am I making a point of this? I am not a protectionist at all. I emphasise it because it is highly significant. If workers were shipped in from faraway China, from outside the European Union, to do jobs which Maltese people were registering to do, then it can't be because the Chinese factory owners found nobody here to do the job. There can be one reason only: they brought in Chinese people because even with the cost of flying them in, housing them and feeding them, it would cost less than paying a Maltese person the minimum wage. And that means that these Chinese workers are being slave-driven in sweatshop conditions, housed and fed in the manner of resident slaves, and this is still cheaper than the minimum wage that would be paid to an EU citizen.

To do this, to bring all these people in, the owners of the factory must have had the support - or the closed eyes - of the government and the Labour Opposition at the time. Jimmy Magro, the Labour Party's former secretary-general and now a senior official of Malta Enterprise - the organisation tasked with monitoring of factories - was connected with Leisure Clothing for many years.

It looks like we have had in our midst, for all these years, a Chinese sweat-shop operation of the sort that we are so hasty to condemn when news of them reaches us from south-east Asia. It is so transparently obvious what has happened here. This Chinese operation wants a valuable 'Made in EU' label but wishes to continue operating in Chinese conditions - so it simply shipped its Chinese factory conditions, workers and all, wholesale from China to Malta. What we have here is a Chinese factory in the European Union selling goods with a Made in EU label, while its employees suffer atrocious Chinese working conditions...in the European Union.

The woman who posted a comment on my website, which I gave prominence as a separate post, described how when she worked at Leisure Clothing some 20 years ago, the conditions were already really bad for the Chinese workers. "They stayed on after we left to go home," she wrote, "they seemed to be spending almost all their time at the factory. A van used to come round to feed them, and they were given terrible food with worms in it, and water."

This is nothing short of slavery in our midst, while ordinary citizens were blind to it, others failed to join the dots, and those in authority - government and Opposition - did nothing about it. It is impossible that they were not aware of rivers of Chinese workers coming in to sew clothes. They would have had to issue the work permits. Suggestions have been made that they were smuggled in. But even here, the authorities must have been deliberately blind to the situation. It is not as though Chinese people blend in enough to be invisible. This sort of abuse - the abuse of people who don't know their rights and who are completely vulnerable and can't stand up for themselves - is the worst of all.