In the raging debate about the skyscrapers planned for Sliema, Mriehel and St Julian’s, one issue has been left out of the discussion completely: who is going to build them? We are well aware by now of who is going to have them built, but the actual construction is going to have to be carried out by gangs of hundreds – if not actually thousands – of labourers or navvies. When skyscrapers are built anywhere else in the world, those labourers are imported. The skyscrapers of New York were, in the first part of the 20th century, built by Irish navvies, many of whom died in the process. The skyscrapers of the United Arab Emirates which so fascinate Muscat and his government were built (still are) by hundreds of thousands of impoverished Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, Indians and Indonesians, who live and work in widely-condemned inhuman conditions in terrible heat, and are paid peanuts while working most of the hours in the day. London’s more recent skyscrapers were built by huge labour gangs of Poles and other immigrant workers, who were not resident in the country but had to be brought over for the purpose.
Are the Maltese skyscrapers going to be any different? Of course not. I don’t think many of those protesting against these planned buildings have stopped to think beyond the disruption that will be caused by the construction, and the environmental impact of the finished buildings. There is a more immediate issue which we should be talking about: from where are the would-be skyscraper magnates planning to import their gangs of navvies, how much are they planning on paying them, and where will they be housed?
It is at times like this that we have to remember that Malta is not part of the United Arab Emirates. It is, ostensibly at least and certainly at law, a civilised country with a social conscience that is obliged to apply the labour laws that shore up the European Union and protect all those who work within its borders, whether they are EU citizens or not. We should already have issues with the way people from the Philippines are considered by their Maltese employers as not being subject to Maltese labour laws because they are accustomed to working hard for little money and with no protection in their own country. So in Malta they are worked six days a week instead of five, kept on duty in the household round the clock, and treated like the household servants of 100 years ago. You would be surprised to find just how many people here in Malta don’t know – or conveniently pretend not to know – that the country’s labour laws apply to everybody working here regardless of their passport or the context.
There is no way those numerous skyscrapers are going to be built concomitantly unless gangs of thousands of navvies are imported en masse from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan or the other impoverished but hardworking nations which feed the power-crazed, money-hungry and oil-fed Gulf states’ demand for ever bigger, fancier and taller buildings. There is not enough construction labour in Malta right now to build even one skyscraper, let alone several. And importing labourers to work on construction sites has a completely different social impact to the thousands of white-collar workers who come over for desk jobs in remote gaming or software or financial services, who rent flats and spend their money in the economy here. The labourers we are talking about do not rent accommodation, but expect to be housed, even if it is only in a tent or a metal container, or a sleeping bag on the construction site itself. They eat basic food, spend nothing and send all their money back home to their families. They are not working abroad for the lifestyle, the experience or to see the world. They do so because they are desperate.
The welfare of workers and their provenance is an important subject and it has to be discussed. Questions have to be asked of the developers as to where they plan to get their labour and where they will house the hundreds or thousands of navvies who will be working on the construction sites. How much will they pay them and are they going to conform to Malta’s labour laws? This island is already rife with the abuse of imported labourers, some of them held captive in slave-like conditions by a Chinese clothing factory, their passports locked away by their employers. There are North Koreans working in Malta who have been given visas since March 2013, when our government is fully aware that they are systematically exported by the North Korean dictatorship as slaves in return for foreign earnings for the state and not for themselves.
I can just see what is going to happen with the building of all those skyscrapers: tent cities or container-towns of impoverished men from Third World countries, paid abusive wages while being reviled by the resident population for their ‘unsavoury habits’ and the negative effect they have on the social fabric of this increasingly nasty and dirty island.
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