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h o b b i e s
The
last stand?
You
want mediocrity? Believe the GWU – otherwise believe in yourself
and stand up to be counted. You only get one life, writes Victor
Paul Borg
Watching the GWU's war mongering the past few weeks, I am reminded
of the main reason why I left Malta. The GWU's motivation is not
reason or vision, but paranoia, personal vendettas, xenophobia,
and outdated politics of confrontation. For every fight they pick
up with the government, they are shooting themselves in the foot.
If they are becoming more belligerent, their hoarse bawling and
foot stomping, their bully tactics, demonstrate their sense of
desperation as they lose the plot and the argument. But besides
its piggyback affair with Alfred Sant's convoluted and non-starter
policies, what exactly is the GWU representing?
An old Maltese friend called me last week and at one point I asked
him about work. ‘It's always the same,' he said. ‘I
can't face working with those bigots any more, and now we are
visiting farms again. It's hell.' I knew it would be the same,
and I ask him about the job out of politeness, and his reply has
been stuck on repeat for the past five years. Almost a decade
ago, he and I started a job with the civil service at the same
time. We worked in Gozo and soon I saw my future extending only
as far as the four walls of my office. In the adjoining office,
my boss and his secretary wasted the day blabbering. I had sufficient
curiosity about life to spent the day reading and take an interest
in writing. I asked to be transferred to Malta so I would be closer
to the decision making on the mainland, but my honeymoon was short-lived.
In Malta I had to do the time without getting the satisfaction
and the interesting work I had hoped for, without making a difference.
My friend on the phone is a good cook, a natural entertainer and
he's got venture capital. ‘Open a restaurant,' I said to
him for the twentieth time. ‘Do something with your life.
You'll work harder but you'll be happier, and satisfied. You only
get one life.' But I can see him staying, if by default, in the
civil service all his life. His habit is comfort: he only has
to be at work for about twenty hours a week. The civil service
has made him lazy, complacent, and eroded his self-confidence
and ambition.
It does that to virtually everyone who works for the government.
Someone else I knew would rather be studying ecology and insects;
instead his mind is rotting in a laboratory where the pieces of
equipment are wasting away from lack of use. Another has an artistic
flair for stone masonry, but that's something he does between
10am (when he leaves his job) and 6pm. Another wants to be a dancer
or teach dancing, but her decision to leave the government job
has already suffered five years of procrastination.
I can understand her self-torment. Three years lapsed between
the time I realised the civil service is a dead horse and the
time I actually walked out the door for the last time. I mean,
when someone is paying you a salary to be lazy, it's hard to muster
an ambition. The civil service is the kind of job where performance
is a concept on paper, sick leave is vacation, accountability
a nice word, and learning is something people do in school. It's
an intellectual swamp (but this could be applied to Malta generally)
and a career blind-end.
Corruption and political interference means the best ideas are
aborted and dignified people quit. People get promoted on the
merit of their political associations or friendships or backstabbing.
The antiquated systems of management mean mountains of paperwork
but not a scratch to show for on the ground. Your bosses are indifferent,
and are too busy entertaining their political masters to actually
do their job anyway. All this killed my initial enthusiasm, and
I still remember the day I looked at my dad who was a civil servant
all his life and I thought, I want a more challenging life than
my dad had. That's when I chucked my job and stood up to face
the world.
But the GWU chiefs want us to believe that Maltese workers are
unprepared to compete with Germans. This is a statement they bounce
about because it strikes the profound self-perception of inferiority
most Maltese suffer from. We grew up believing that foreigners
to our north can do a better job. But this inferiority complex
is only just that – a complex – and you only have to
ask the Maltese who emigrated to see that. I have several uncles
and cousins scattered in North America and Australia, and they
have all done very well: they own businesses, big houses in suburbia,
and they are as worldly as they are streetwise.
When I told my dad I was moving to London to write full-time,
he taunted my resolve. ‘Yeah?' he said. ‘What makes
you think newspapers and publishers are waiting for you to turn
up?' Less than two years later I do what tens of thousands of
British citizens can only dream of. Yes, it's a struggle. Writing
is hard, and big cities are brutally anonymous, but at least I
am excited and looking ahead. I've moved far beyond my working
class roots.
When the GWU chiefs – and the MLP – tell us that workers
in Malta have a better deal than their EU counterparts, they only
show their extent of mental isolation. Workers in Malta have to
do two jobs to put a roof on their head and a car in their garage
and half their life is a race to stay ahead of debts. The sum
of their entertainment is a drive to Cirkewwa or Marsascala or
Sliema every Sunday afternoon, and granted, they may pick half
a dozen pastizzi and an ice-cream along the way. Workers in Britain,
for example, go out for dinner every two weeks, a night out in
town at least once a week, a weekend in the country every three
months and a holiday abroad at least once a year. Last Christmas
the British spent an average of Lm450 on presents. All this, plus
a comfortable home, better services and infrastructure –
and they only do one job, not two.
The Internet is revolutionising the nature of work. By 2010, projections
in the Western World show that a third of the workforce will be
freelance, another third working part-time or studying and only
a third in full-time employment. But instead of anticipating the
future, the GWU is speaking to the old civil service mentality
of mediocrity. The people who have a fatalistic and isolationist
worldview. The people who think the Germans have a higher God.
The people who have yet to shed their anti-colonial emotional
baggage and wake up to the fact that Malta is an independent country
now.
EU membership means a bridge to northern Europe's standard of
living, more career choices for workers, more rights and a better
deal. Above all EU membership will demonstrate to Maltese workers
that they are at least as good as the Germans – and that's
the most valuable lesson Malta will learn in forty years of independence.
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