Last week, the Malta Employers Association published the results of a survey on wage inflation and its consequences. The results call for some considerations.

We reported the results extensively last week.

The survey results are a snapshot of what is happening in our country and identifies trends which outline what the future may be like.

The survey showed that the labour market is facing skills shortages and is increasingly having to rely on foreign labour to meet demand.

At the same time, there is an ever increasing higher labour turnover resulting in added labour costs due to the costs of recruitment and training.

Many companies which were surveyed reported labour cost increases that outpace productivity gains and thus may negatively affect the long sustainability of many enterprises. This phenomenon, the survey reported, is prevalent across all sectors of the eco0nomy and irrespective of whether a company is unionised or not.

In this scenario, the public sector is competing with the private sector for Maltese labour. Just under one-fifth of respondents blamed their labour turnover to employment with the public sector, particularly as regards unskilled and semi-skilled employees.

In other words, the report seems to be saying, we could be looking at a future where most Maltese end up working in the public sector and what remains of the private sector is increasingly dependent on foreign labour.

After all, we board a bus and the driver is non-Maltese; we go to a restaurant and are served by a non-Maltese; our rubbish gets picked up by non-Maltese....

This is what our economy has come to. There are causes and effects all around. Maltese people find it easy to get employed by the government because politicians give out jobs like there's no tomorrow - after all, it does not cost them anything.

Faced with that kind of situation, the private sector finds itself more and more dependent on foreign labour.

Yet foreign labour is at best fickle. Faced with increased rents and a higher cost of living many foreign workers come to see that the wages they work for in Malta are not that extraordinary and they find themselves sinking in a raging sea of higher costs. Hence many of them decide to go back.

For all that this might please the Maltese xenophobes, this is not a situation without its bad side - it costs money to recruit, it costs money to train and it costs money to keep raising wages so as to retain foreign employees.

Somewhat ironically, the survey recommends that Identity Malta processes applications faster. In the short term, this will mean an ever larger influx of foreign workers.

It also recommends helping persons who reach pensionable age to remain in the work force and also continuing to improve the participation of women in the labour force while it continues to urge the government to refrain from introducing measures that increase labour costs to businesses.

But perhaps even more to the point, it calls for long-term economic growth strategies to be based on efficiencies and higher output per person rather than on just an increase of working people.

The report says, and then does not say, what is really wrong with the current economy - the reliance on foreign workers, an open door policy that has changed the landscape of our country in just a few years, just as the equally laissez-faire policy has allowed any person to think himself a developer and allowed such people to pull down houses with abandon just as an equally short-sighted vision allows with equanimity the destroying of so many trees from most roads.

Nor does the report come to the conclusion to which it points: the need to change the current template of the Maltese economy before things go from bad to worse.

Its one saving note is that while we are continually bombarded with claims we have never had it so good, this report shows things are not so rosy in the State of Denmark.