THE GOVERNMENT IS BURNING OUR MONEY AND WE ARE HELPLESS

by a Blog Reader

Tourism is a labour-intensive industry, accounting for approximately 30% of our Gross Domestic Product. There are over 40,000 direct tourism jobs, most of them poorly paid labour from developing countries. Visit any of our main hotels for a coffee or lunch and you will witness how tourist jobs have been hollowed out. They are mostly jobs for others, not for the Maltese. In some geographic districts of Malta, as many as half the foreign waiters are estimated to be off the books. This is why your eyes tell you that the economy is bursting at the seams, with jobs everywhere, more than ever before, while the official unemployment rate for Maltese workers has only moved by a paltry 2% since Labour opened the doors wide open for the invasion from developing countries.

Tourism

There are two population segments that have gained immensely from Labour’s economic folly. One is the developing countries whose young citizens constitute the cheap labour pool in the Maltese market. The other is “tal-business,” who can extract more work at lower cost. Capitalism is the name of the game. This is how the top strata, or the rich, get richer.

And this is how the poor get poorer. The Maltese middle class, which always had low salaries and wages by Western standards, is being squeezed out of many job markets. The middle class faces a fork in the road. Either it picks up trade skills or a professional education, or it joins the lower strata of Maltese society. Because the lower strata is increasingly swelling, many middle class people do not realize the extent to which they are losing out to the top strata of society. They just look around them and see many others in the local clubs and bars that are in their predicament. It can’t be that bad, they reason wrongly: “We’re all in the same boat.” 

It’s only when the official NSO statistics are released that many are reminded that over 85,000 Maltese are living at the risk of poverty. The income of the 85,000 is under about €10,200 annually. Excluded here are those who are at risk of social exclusion, whose number is increasing at an alarming rate as the population continues to age. These are the ones who have nowhere to go when the heatwave debilitates them. They have no relatives to welcome them with a functioning air conditioner for even just a few days. This is one reason Mater Dei Hospital is full, like never before, with heat-related admissions.

We have long standing laws that guarantee a minimum wage. These laws have served us well in assuring a decent living wage. The work ethic assures a fair wage for a fair job. The onus is on both sides, the employer and employee, to enter into a dignified work relationship that will see both sides better off. Taxes are paid and the government benefits as a result. But things have changed with the invasion of cheap foreign labour which blatantly undercuts the minimum wage. Imported labour is a threat to the livelihood of Maltese workers. It is also a threat to tax collection. The only winners left are the underpaid foreigners who, despite their low wages, are in better financial shape than they would have been in their own country. The other winner is the employer, many times the only Maltese left better off.

Given the diametrically opposite interests of the Maltese employer, and the large swath of Maltese workers shafted to the side, whose side is the government on? The answer is evident. The Malta Labour Party is now the party of the rich. Even the General Workers Union has become an employer in its own right, funded by ludicrous government grants. How could the employer and the union be the same? Whose side is the union on when it’s also the employer? Who suffers? Mostly, the taxpayer who is funding the generous grants to the union for fake jobs.

This is why the national debt has doubled under the Labour government. If the economy were properly functioning, it would generate a fortune for the tax collector. But the fortune fizzles out before it gets to the taxman. Someone will have to pay the accumulating national debt. We can’t keep kicking the can down the road.

There is a story about a turkey that was fed half a cup of grain daily. Life seemed good. The future was predictable. This is how it seemed to the turkey. One day it all stopped. The suddenness of it surprised the Greeks as well about fifteen years ago. And that could just as well be the financial fate that awaits us in Malta. Bankruptcy has been a long-lasting calvary for the Greeks. Just when their economy began to recover lately, they were hit once again, this time by the cost-of-living crisis.

The United Emirates relies on a foreign workforce and gushing oil that pays for everything. We increasingly rely on a foreign workforce too and an ever-increasing national debt instead of free oil reserves. The Maltese will continue to vote Labour because we are not bankrupt. Not being bankrupt is good news. The bad news is that each day we are increasingly close as Giselle Scicluna pointed out in this blog. Bankrupt practices cannot hold.