[WATCH] Migrant jobs scheme will help clamp down on worker abuse, minister insists

A proposed job centre to regulate migrants seeking short-term employment will help clamp down on their exploitation, education and employment minister Evarist Bartolo has argued.

“Human dignity is irrelevant of nationality and skin colour, and the system will be based on the principle of equal pay for equal work,” Bartolo told MaltaToday during a press conference. “This will be in the best interest of both foreign workers and local ones – who suffer from the undercutting of wages.”

The scheme, set to be launched by the end of March, will establish two temping agencies at the Marsa and Hal Far open centres. Instead of loitering for work at popular hangouts like the Marsa bypass roundabout, these workers will instead have to register themselves at one of the brokerage office. Employers seeking short-term employment will then apply at one of the offices, which will match them up with migrant workers on their records.

JobsPlus had originally proposed a voucher system – whereby employers would purchase vouchers from the brokerage office and hand them to migrant workers at the end of the job, to be cashed in at one of the brokerage offices. However, it was scrapped after meeting resistance from 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 – who will likely have to decide between their word against their employer’s.

When asked how this scheme will be able to clamp down on the exploitation down of migrants – the raison d’etre of the government’s original proposal – Bartolo said that it will facilitate the supervision of their work conditions. 

“We must first get these workers out of the black economy, and then addresses abuses as we address abuses in other economic sectors,” he said. “Just because an economic sector doesn’t operate within the black economy doesn’t mean that there’s no room for abuse. There’s no automatic system that could safeguard these workers from abuse, but removing them from the black economy will facilitate supervision.

JobsPlus executive chairman Clyde Caruana said that the scheme will start as a pilot project, after which it will be analyzed and potentially tweaked.

“We couldn’t have a voucher system in place with different denominations for different types of work, because that would have rendered the system too complex and inflexible,” he said. “We took a decision to start the scheme off as something simple so as to resolve the problems of loitering and worker abuse. One cannot start building a complex system from the start, but must first start with an initiative that will be updated over time in the immigrants’ best interests.”