Call it ironic but Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, a former president of the Catholic Action Movement, may be the one to declare the second most important date in the Christian calendar, Christmas, a normal working day.
The Prime Minister’s plan to clamp down on public holidays that fall on a weekend is a clumsy one. The plan would involve the government issuing a notice at the beginning of every year to declare which days listed in the National Holidays and other Public Holidays Act shall not be observed as public holidays.
To implement the budget measure that stops public holidays that fall on a weekend from being added on to employees’ leave entitlement, Gonzi will shortly have to issue a notice in the Government Gazette to declare that New Year’s Day (1 January), the feast of St Joseph (19 March), Workers’ Day (1 May) and Christmas Day (25 December) will this year not be considered as public holidays. The status of yesterday, 1 January remains in doubt since no official decision has been taken to date.
The Public Holidays Act includes a schedule that lists all public holidays in addition to the five national holidays. However, Section 5 of the law allows the Prime Minister to order that any day listed in the schedule not to be observed as a public holiday.
In 2006 Gonzi would then have to issue another notice declaring that New Year’s Day and the feast of St Joseph – the holidays that fall on a weekend - will not be observed as public holidays.

It will definitely not be workers’ year, this year.
Proof of this, if proof is needed, comes in a symbolic way and concerns May Day, the public holiday of the proletariat which symbolises workers’ unity and their inalienable rights at the workplace.
Well, if what the Prime Minister is suggesting goes according to plan, 2005 will mean that public holidays falling on weekends will disappear, and May Day is one of them.
1 May this year will fall on a Sunday (as will Christmas and the next New Year’s Day) and Lawrence Gonzi is determined not to have it added to workers’ vacation leave.
To do this, he intends changing the National Holidays and Other Public Holidays Act in what appears to be a last-minute brainwave to save face after announcing his budget measures, when he failed to specify how he intended to implement his unpopular measure.
On 10 January he is expected to present his latest amendments to the law in Parliament after it became clear that his earlier plans, including scrapping part of the Labour laws, were going to be ineffective and would have been harshly challenged in court.
With effectively no time for social partners on the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development to reach an agreement on this one, Gonzi seems keen to go it on his own despite unions’ declaration of looming industrial unrest on the horizon.
An agreement is “practically impossible” according to General Workers’ Union Secretary General Tony Zarb, who told The Malta Independent that “workers cannot continue carrying more burdens and neither can they afford to have someone eat away at their working conditions”.
His counterpart at the Union Haddiema Maghqudin, Gejtu Vella, was more optimistic, perhaps overly so. “If necessary we should meet at Christmas time, set a timeframe, and I’m sure we will be able to reach a solution by the end of the year,” he said, before the year was over.
Still, he minced no words in his criticism for the government’s decision: “This has never been discussed, not even during social pact discussions. It’s a half-baked, haphazard measure suggested to government that will solve nothing.”
Vella also questioned the use of social dialogue at the MCESD when government was implementing measures unilaterally.
“What’s the message it (the government) is sending? That whenever government feels it is taking a decision in the national interest it will just go about scrapping parts of current laws unilaterally? That whenever there is no immediate agreement through social dialogue government just assumes it knows everything and bypasses everybody else? Structured social dialogue is a very difficult process. Government needs people who are able to convince, but it also needs people who know what workers are going through.”
So what role will the MCESD have in 2005? Having failed to reach a social pact, Gonzi has made it clear he will be taking decisions on his own, half-baked or not.
Employers seem to be on his side, even though they are skeptical about how effective Gonzi’s measures will be for the country’s ailing economy and low productivity.
“The MCESD is a consultative forum,” said the Malta Employers’ Association’s Director General, Joseph Farrugia. “There is no need for consensus and it is not fair to expect consensus on certain issues. The government should weigh and do what is best; otherwise it might as well not govern at all.”
Farrugia blamed the unions’ “huffing and puffing” for the failed agreement. Considering their attitude, “we might as well not discuss anything,” he said.
The Federation of Industry gave Gonzi a more qualified show of support. While appealing to government to take measures to increase productivity and to unions to reach an agreement, its President, Anton Borg, believes the government’s latest plan to implement the public holidays measure is wrong.
“The measure announced by the government is now worse,” he told The Times. “Because those working on such days will not be paid the premium they used to receive. The government can change any law and to maintain industrial peace the government declared it would now amend the National and Public Holidays Act. As it stands, failure to reach agreement is worse. But there are not many solutions unless the unions are prepared to budge.”
Reducing a number of days of vacation leave, even if only for three years, could have been a solution, Borg added, “but that entails changes to the Employment and Industrial Relations Act which change the unions oppose.”
So Gonzi has managed successfully to pave the way for a year of industrial unrest even though the unions can do little to stop him from removing a number of public holidays every year in what is now expected to become an annual clumsy event of deletion.
Privately, workers all over the islands grumble and promise to report sick for every vacation day that Gonzi takes from them. It might happen, although that kind of attitude is regretted.
Even sadder is the fact that this measure, on its own, will hardly have any tangible effect on productivity. At best, we will increase productivity by 1.5 per cent. To be sure of the exact extent we will have to check official figures in a year’s time, although in the realm of perceptions, workers from the middle class downwards feel they are already worse off.

karl@newsworksltd.com