Workers risk abuse with watered-down jobs scheme

A job centre for workers seeking short-term employment that was originally intended by the government as a way of clamping down on the exploitation of migrants, will not in fact include any safeguards against worker abuse.

The scheme, set to be launched by the end of March, will establish two job brokerage offices at the Marsa and Hal Far open centres, which host asylum seekers and refugees.

Instead of loitering for work at popular hangouts like the Marsa bypass roundabout, these workers will instead have to register themselves and state their skills at one of the brokerage offices. Employers seeking short-term employment will then apply at one of the offices, which will match them up with migrant workers on their records.

In the original consultation document, the national employment centre JobsPlus had proposed a voucher system – whereby employers would purchase vouchers from the brokerage office and hand them to the migrant workers at the end of the job, to be cashed in at one of the brokerage offices.

Salaries would have been fixed at €6 per hour should the migrant work individual hours, €5.75 per hour should the migrant work between 10 to 20 hours and €5.50 per hour should he work between 21 and 40 hours. The minimum €5.50 per hour payment would have been equivalent to the minimum wage, factoring in social security contributions paid by the employer, the cost of 24 days leave and 10 days sick leave and the statutory bonus. 

The voucher system could have theoretically been abused by employers by making migrant workers work longer hours, but would have at least offered a level of protection to them by making employers fork out the money beforehand.  

However, JobsPlus executive chairman Clyde Caruana told MaltaToday that the voucher system has now been scrapped entirely – after it was strongly resisted by the General Workers’ Union and other social partners, who had opposed the flat rate of payment set at the minimum wage. 

Instead, employers will now simply sign a form that will state the migrant workers’ names, the dates and hours in which he will work, and the wage he will be paid directly. To seek justice, underpaid migrants will have to take their case to the Department of Industrial Relations, a situation Caruana admitted is not favourable to them.  

“The migrants will be in an awkward position to prove that they’re telling the truth – essentially it will be their word against their employer’s. Everything is against them in the system, but I can only do so much within my remit.

“We could ask for proof of payment, but the problem is that most of these migrants don’t have a bank account, which means that transactions are cash-based and untraceable. 

“The voucher would have ensured payment and would have been harder to abuse, but there were objections to it… you cannot have your cake and eat it, it’s a bit frustrating to be honest.” 

He added that the scheme – which will be operated by a private company chosen following a tender process – will start as a pilot project, and that he doesn’t exclude introducing the voucher system eventually if the system is rampantly abused from the get-go. 

“I’ll try everything possible for the scheme to be successful, but it’s not going to be foolproof and unforeseen circumstances could easily - we’re treading uncharted territory after all. At the end of the day, these people have been loitering at the Marsa roundabout for years and this scheme will be a first to try and tackle it… let’s see how it works out.”

3,000 unregistered migrant workers

Caruana said that the scheme is also an attempt to clamp down on black market labour, whereby employers hire migrants without registering them with JobsPlus. Indeed, on-site inspections by JobsPlus last year revealed at least 3,000 such workers – the majority of whom were EU nationals, but also included several people who were granted refugee status in Italy but travelled to Malta to search for work, despite not having work permits.”

“Our spot checks show that at least 50% of employers employ at least one person off the books,” he said. “By regularizing short-term employment, we’ll finally be in a position to give an estimate on how many unregistered migrant workers are actually in Malta. It is our responsibility to put our house in order.”

To enforce this clampdown, Parliament will later this year debate a Bill that will double the amount of JobsPlus inspectors from eight to 16. Fines for employers caught employing people without work permits will also shoot up astronomically – the minimum fine going up from €58 to €500, with the maximum fine set at €2,500.