‘Malta sells a dream of a modern country, then it goes up in flames’

Sunita came to Malta in 2018, expecting that Maltese wages could help her finance a good life for herself in the Mediterranean and her two children back home – an African country.

But her experience has been less than desirable, characterised in large by missing payslips and aggressive employers.

In Spring of 2018, Sunita found a job as a live-in nanny with a Maltese family. When they were on vacation she would look after the house, the dog, the car and the children. The family was pleased with how the first nine months of the relationship panned out, but things went sour after Sunita chose to apply for a Maltese car license.

“My employer would sometimes ask me to take her car out, but my license doesn’t apply here, and I didn’t want to risk losing my license. She would sometimes get angry,” Sunita said.

One time, before a scheduled car lesson, her employer got angry with Sunita, and questioned whether she had other motives for starting car lessons or asking for payslips. Eventually, Sunita opted to find a new job.

For third-country nationals (TCNs) applying for or renewing their single permit application, deadlines are key. “If we don’t meet them, we’d have to leave the country,” Sunita said.

She then confronted her employer and started asking for her payslips, but the employer was particularly hostile.

“The Department for Industrial and Employment Relations (DIER) helped, and they advised me that receiving payslips are a legal requirement, and that it’s okay to ask your employer for a payslip. But when I asked my employer, she started getting angry. ‘You don’t trust me, you’re trusting DIER’ – she told me. The relationship completely broke down, and I opened a formal complaint.

“She then threatened to call the police, saying that I was being disrespectful and was giving her a bad image.”

On top of this, the payslips were inflated, and Sunita was only being paid in cash. Some of the income was being written off as a fringe benefit, and in the long term this increased her tax bill. At first, Sunita was living in-house with her employer – offered free of charge – but then it was written off as a fringe benefit.

“The job of a nanny requires you to be inside the home,” Sunita’s partner Chris explained. “With her hours, it’s impossible to live somewhere else. There’s no choice, and it’s no fringe benefit.”

But This isn’t a mere bureaucratic issue with no tangible effects. Because of her inflated payslips, Sunita was eventually faced with a burdensome tax situation.

“This was an issue we were working on this past year. First we started with the DIER, but they said that they can’t do anything about tax issues. I tried arguing that this is an issue from the employer’s side – you’re not holding the employer accountable and that’s in your remit,” Chris said.

“We then went to the Commissioner for Revenue, but they said that they can’t do anything, and that they rely on the FS3 sent by the employer. I told them that these are grounds for fraud risk. There are two different versions of the payslip – there’s the contract amount and the payslip amount. But they said that they can’t open investigations. Now, she’s facing a major tax bill.

“I spoke with an employment lawyer, got an accountant, and the accountant drafted a report showing her side of the story, including the inconsistencies and how the employer acted wrongly with the payslips. I wrote a letter to the Commissioner, Marvin Gaerty, and now it is being investigated.”

After one battle in her first job, a new place of work at a boutique hotel looked promising. Sunita was initially hired under the role of a butler in Spring 2019. She was happy to have found continuing work, and her private insurance was in place. However, she was having a problem with her eyes.

“Some of this was the employer’s fault, as dust had been falling into her eyes while cleaning the old walls of the hotel. She had to buy the protection herself. But health insurance came back saying your account has been closed – apparently the employer was not actually paying for health insurance. He was talking about ‘national insurance’,” Chris scoffed.

Sunita explained how she was never insured during her time at the boutique hotel. “I was cooking everything without a food handling course, there was no emergency fire equipment in the kitchen. The hotel wasn’t even supposed to have a kitchen because it wasn’t licensed. It can be a total jungle sometimes.”

And the hours were taxing – Sunita was often working 60 hours per week at the hotel. “My body was giving up. I was sleeping as if someone drugged me, I could hardly even open my eyes. My flatmates can tell you: they never saw me at home, and definitely not in the kitchen because I would never had time to eat.”

Sunita avoided opening any complaints about this employer, but Chris took things into his own hands.

“I opened an anonymous complaint with the DIER without telling Sunita. I couldn’t accept that the employer was treating her so badly, and not issuing payslips. It took months of communication with the DIER, but they eventually did heir own checks and went to the hotel.

“I don’t think they organised it as best as they could have. She was put on the spot. The inspectors went to the hotel, but they asked her some questions in front of her employer. She couldn’t just speak. Even when they were speaking privately with the DIER inspectors, business partners were trying to eavesdrop.

“I was angry - I phoned the DIER and sent them emails detailing everything that a company should have, such as punch-clocks. They said they checked everything and couldn’t find any issues on site – yet they didn’t even confirm if she was receiving her payslips! If you have a complaint or a suspicion about a workplace, you should double-check, triple-check these irregularities, and not take the employer’s word at face-value.”

The employer suspected that Sunita filed the complaint. “I kept telling him it wasn’t me. He told me to close the complaint, but I said if I didn’t open it, how could I close it?”

Chris remarked that these issues are not because of legislative flaws. “A lot of the laws are beautiful. The whole law looks good when you look at it. But is there enforcement? I say no. There’s a whole bureaucratic process with Identity Malta, the DIER are nowhere to be seen, and the employer does whatever they like.

“Malta sells a dream as a modern free country, but when you arrive it all goes up in flames.”

He added that the Inland Revenue department receives a lot of paperwork from the employer, but this isn’t cross-checked against the employee’s papers. “No one asks if she received the payslip, or if she received the amount indicated. Now, she has to find a lawyer and pay.”

Lawyers don’t offer too much hope – they advised Sunita that she’s better off paying the bill and leaving. Even if there’s scope for a court case, and a lawyer admitted that there was such scope, it could drag on for a number of years and consist of high expenses.

“I’m just here for my two children. I want to pay the tax bill, but only when I receive what is due. Nothing more, nothing less.”