Union boss disputes claims of waging holy war on 'precarious jobs'

The president of the General Workers Union has taken issue with the president of the Malta Developers Association over the extent of precariousness in Malta's labour market.

Victor Carachi replied to claims by Michael Falzon that the GWU was conducting a "holy war against precarious employment", insisting that the union's research on the existence of job precarity is being ignored by employers' associations in the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development (see page 18).

"The GWU does not speak in the air when referring to precarious work and the abuse of workers, as these examples are amply corroborated in the report."

A survey of 390 employees found 51% of workers in "precarious or sub-standard employment" did not have a salary that permitted a decent standard of living, with 28% paid less than minimum wage, 23% underpaid on overtime, and 22% lacking health and safety guarantees.

"Contrary to what Mr Falzon believes, the GWU righty feels that in some cases it makes more economical sense for the government to employ these people directly rather than tendering for services from private entities. Besides the economic benefits, it would also serve as another step forward in combating precarious employment," Carachi writes in MaltaToday.

Cases of precarious employment have, in the past, included services companies picked by government to offer cleaning or secretarial work, on competitive tenders, which however paid their employees at rates below the minimum wage and without job security.

In his regular MaltaToday column, Falzon - a former PN minister - insisted that what actually constitutes precarious employment had not yet been properly defined.

"The present administration decided to impose a number of mandatory conditions to be included in every tender issued by government so as to ensure that any tenderer awarded a contract would not be able to use 'precarious employees'. These conditions include the prohibition of the possibility that the services provided be subcontracted to third parties or carried out by self-employed persons.

"In short, these services can be carried out solely by the registered employees of the contractor, who is also obliged to keep records of employees used on the contract... the Chamber [of Commerce] said it feared that the revised regulations would create a number of negative effects on the private sector and on SMEs in particular, as they eliminated the opportunity for certain SMEs to participate in the public tender process. It precluded them from acting as sub-contractors."

Falzon, who is today the president of construction developers' lobby MDA, claimed the GWU was interested in saying more employees becoming registered workers in the public sector, bolstering its union membership.

"Like other trade union in the free world, the GWU has more clout in the case of members who are state employees than in the case of members who are employees in the private sector... union bosses everywhere prefer defending employees in the public sector to those in the private sector. The latter do work that could be done directly by public employees. So is there a hidden agenda behind the GWU's holy war against precarious employment?"