It is highly probable that instead of being in decline, precarious employment in Malta is on the rise. Which applies not just for foreign workers coming from Africa or the Middle East but equally for Maltese job seekers, especially young people.
What signals this most clearly is that the presence of unions at workplaces in the private sector has continued to shrink. Without active and well established unions, it is futile to rely on government action to counter exploitation. State agencies cannot cover all sectors of economic activity, not least services oriented enterprises.
Moreover, given the culture that during the last two decades if not more, has served to promote flexibility at workplaces, a mentality has arisen by which the idea that a person should stay for long years in the same job is considered outdated. Ever so often, workers have to get accustomed to change the job they hold.
There are those who seek to convince you that not only is this way of doing things necessary; it is also beneficial to the society at large, as well as to individual workers. Indeed, why not? Come on.
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Abortion
AD’s Carmel Caccopardo has done well to put up for public discussion abortion, a subject that has remained taboo in our society. This is not because it does not happen here.
Of course it does and always has. But all discussion regarding the practice has always been relegated to a limbo where only the most disgusting forms of behaviour, such as cannibalism, can come up for review.
Many in the European Parliament – not just socialists – cannot understand how this sentiment still prevails in Malta. In the face of the astonishment provoked there by this state of affairs, my stock reply has been that the anti-abortion sentiment is so ingrained in the Maltese situation, that even the Greens share it. It seems like I won’t be able to use this argument any more.
Actually the situation is underpinned by massive hypocrisy. On the one hand we express scandal at foreign news items about an abortion on an eleven year old girl who was raped by a member of her own family. On the other hand we all know about Maltese women who had to go to Sicily or London to get an abortion.
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Liberalism
The debate which was being conducted recently about liberalism – its merits and demerits – was interesting if confused. As I know it, there are three major currents of thought that in the West, go under the label of “liberal”. It seemed to me that much of the confusion resulted from the fact that not everybody was referring to the same “current”.
In the US, “liberalism” is “left-wing” – an ideology that allows for intervention in the free market with state measures, by way of regulation and beyond – a kind of social democracy in the European sense.
In Europe, liberalism emphasizes the need for a person in society to be able to enjoy fully the right for personal autonomy and freedom in his/her life, with the state guaranteeing this but in the context of a free market, from which the state itself remains aloof.
Neo-liberalism as practised everywhere, emphasizes the importance of the free market at all costs, period. Its claim is that within such a framework, the rights of citizens as well as social wellbeing are automatically guaranteed.