When we were negotiating the Work Life Balance Directive in 2019, we sought to ensure a European minimum standard of rights for working families, and that these measures address gender equality. Thanks to the Directive, fathers, mothers and carers will enjoy rights that can enable Malta to achieve these aims.

For starters, parental leave must be paid for the first two months. Another two unpaid months are granted, but which can be transferred to the other parent. Central to the Work-Life Balance Directive are measures promoting flexibility, which is why these aren’t meant to be taken in chunks, but up until the child turns eight.

This flexibility should encourage a better sharing of caring responsibilities between parents, which grants women more opportunities to stay at work. This is true when compared to the status quo, where mothers are more likely than fathers to make sacrifices at work to accommodate the children.

From the very start, fathers can be more involved in caring responsibilities thanks also to an extension of leave entitlement. The minimum established in the Directive is 10 days of paid leave upon the birth of the child. For Malta, this is a massive improvement from the one day of leave afforded to fathers.

However, the Directive is not a target, but a starting point. While it obliges Member States to adopt minimum standards if their laws are below the Directive rights, it also invites them to go beyond the minimum.

Governments should consider how best to achieve the broader aims of the Directive, meaning to achieve a better work-life balance for the nation’s workforce. This requires meaningful stakeholder consultation, including from employers and civil society.

Ultimately, governments should design a framework of rights that effects rights in practice. This is the only way that governments can realistically address the pervasive gender inequalities in pay, employment and pension levels.

Having rigid, one-size-fits-all policies cannot work.

This is also true on the EU level. Every EU country has its own social security system, and therefore very different ways of administering different parental benefits. What the Directive does is enshrine a minimum based on a picture of what European nations were already offering. Most policies were generous, but there were outliers, like Malta, for whom the Directive delivers among the biggest changes.

When it comes to leave for fathers, for instance, 17 Member States offered at least as much paternal leave in 2018 as is now guaranteed by the Directive. This means that a majority of EU member states offered at least two working weeks of leave for new fathers, with some going as high as five working weeks.

Sticking to the bare minimum is not the way to go. Yet this is the path the Labour Government took.

The Work Life Balance Directive has been among the most anticipated pieces of legislation to be enacted this summer. It has been coming for years, at least since I finalised negotiations on behalf of the European Parliament, after which the Directive entered into force. Since then, the Maltese Government had all the time in the world to have consultations and parliamentary debates.

Yet it was only days before the transposition deadline that the Maltese Government published a legal notice, in the peak of summer, when Parliament in recess could not put it under any scrutiny. No sooner was it public than social partners began lamenting errors in the legal notice that could have been easily avoided had proper consultations actually taken place.

In a press conference on Tuesday, Partit Nazzjonalista called on the Government to improve the legal notice, with specific recommendations.

Without these changes, Maltese families risk missing out on the best that the Directive can offer. In fact, some restrictions on when new fathers can take their leave go contrary to the spirit of the Directive. Restricting fathers to take paternal leave immediately upon birth betrays the fact that not all mothers are discharged from hospital at the same time.

On parental leave, the Government has not only chosen to give sick pay entitlements, which are among the lowest in the EU, but has put the cost on the private sector after 2023.

By going once more for the bare minimum, the Government is simply encouraging the status quo. That means having one parent, usually the mother, give up the most in terms of her work so that the other parent can remain at work to support the household.

The Maltese Government should not miss the opportunity that the Work-Life Balance Directive creates to improve our workforce’s work-life balance and gender equality in society. It should revise its policy on pay, and create a model whereby the private sector would not have to finance all the measures. 

It is clear that the Government needs to revise aspects of the legal notice. And on this we will keep pushing. The Directive is an unprecedented development for working families across Malta and Gozo. We now need a better draft of the legal notice to make this happen in practice. 

David Casa was the European Parliament’s lead negotiator on the Work-Life Balance Directive.