The Malta Independent on Sunday
This is what 900 shipyards workers who were declared redundant and unfit for the development plans of the new shipyard company were loudly asking last week.
This is what 900 shipyards workers who were declared redundant and unfit for the development plans of the new shipyard company were loudly asking last week.
Downsizing
the shipyards’ work-force is inevitable for its survival. Given that we are
struggling to get more work throughput, efficiency cannot be gained by doing
more with same resources. It has to be achieved by doing the same with less resources. Less resources means labour redundancies.
This plan was negotiated with the GWU and voted in by the employees themselves. Yet when it came to the selection process of those employees who had to leave to give a chance for the enterprises to remain afloat and secure the jobs of those who were chosen to remain, those affected inevitably asked why me?
I contend that the way the exercise was handled this time is strategically superior and more sensible than earlier similar exercises. Those employees who are needed to stay have been ring-fenced and are not being offered any early retirement scheme. In earlier versions of slimming down programmes early retirement was generally open to the whole workforce, leading the shipyard to lose some of the most talented hands which were desperately needed in the survival plan. It makes no sense to offer those you need most cash handouts encouraging them to leave.
This time at least the management has protected the human resources it needs for the survival exercises and offered retirement schemes to those it considers surplus to its requirements. This by no means assures that the exercise has been thoroughly objective and driven solely by efficiency considerations. It would have been, and still is, much more preferable if management offers more visibility on the criteria used for the selection exercise to give confidence that decisions were made solely in the best interest of the new shipyard enterprise.
But I think that the “why me?” should be asked to the government in a wider context by the whole shipyards work-force. Why have the shipyards been chosen as a show of force for the government’s determination to stem the financial haemorrhage caused by State subsidies? This is all well in so far as it goes but it definitely does not go far enough.
Who is going to address the far more severe over manning that still remains in the public sector? The fact that this overmanning is camouflaged by direct budget expenditure votes rather than isolated as subsidy to State enterprises does not make it any less serious.
It is in fact far more serious than the shipyards’ problem. At least the shipyard workers used to punch in for work, work a few hours of the punched-in time and earn some foreign currency for the State. Many of the surplus workers in the public sector do not even care to punch in or out, do not bother to work at all and produce absolutely nothing.
In the interest of fairness the labour re-structure programme for the public sector cannot start and end with the shipyards. And it would be wrong to continue relying on early retirement schemes as a viable solution for public sector downsizing. This is expensive and unproductive. We cannot bring about efficiency if we continue to allocate substantial scarce resources to motivate people to drop out of the workforce.
Furthermore, as I have long been arguing, it is atrocious social discrimination for the State to allocate so much resources to free itself of unneeded labour resources while leaving totally unprotected those citizens who lose their jobs through redundancy in private sector enterprises.
Those who profess social democracy, including political parties, the unions and the Church just cannot pretend that it is OK to create such gross discrimination between citizens who work in the public sector and those who work in the private sector. Resources have to be fairly allocated to balance the rights and protection among all citizens who equally contribute taxes on their earned incomes whether earned from public employment or private enterprise.
If we have financial resources to oil the re-structuring process these should not be applied to pay excess resources in the public sector to opt out of the labour market. They should be applied to re-train excess labour resources, whether in the public or in the private sector, to learn new skills to facilitate the transition to new productive jobs.
This is what social justice demands. This is what good economic management demands. Resources applied on re-training will be repaid through economic growth generated when the re-trained resources are placed into productive jobs. On the contrary resources spent on putting people out of the labour market will simply produce more demands as these people claim their rights in social support schemes.
Yet in the face of all this social injustice everyone seems to have lost interest in protecting private sector employees by insisting on fair re-balancing of workers rights and obligations across the whole labour market. Everyone seems blind to the plight of those who are being forced to retire early from private sector jobs not because they chose any cash bundle through some early retirement scheme but because at their advanced age with out-dated skills they have no chance of finding a new job in an economy which is losing jobs at a faster rate than it is creating them.
The plight of these middle aged redundant former private sector employees who daily lament “why me?” remains unheard by those who have the social responsibility to do better.
This plan was negotiated with the GWU and voted in by the employees themselves. Yet when it came to the selection process of those employees who had to leave to give a chance for the enterprises to remain afloat and secure the jobs of those who were chosen to remain, those affected inevitably asked why me?
I contend that the way the exercise was handled this time is strategically superior and more sensible than earlier similar exercises. Those employees who are needed to stay have been ring-fenced and are not being offered any early retirement scheme. In earlier versions of slimming down programmes early retirement was generally open to the whole workforce, leading the shipyard to lose some of the most talented hands which were desperately needed in the survival plan. It makes no sense to offer those you need most cash handouts encouraging them to leave.
This time at least the management has protected the human resources it needs for the survival exercises and offered retirement schemes to those it considers surplus to its requirements. This by no means assures that the exercise has been thoroughly objective and driven solely by efficiency considerations. It would have been, and still is, much more preferable if management offers more visibility on the criteria used for the selection exercise to give confidence that decisions were made solely in the best interest of the new shipyard enterprise.
But I think that the “why me?” should be asked to the government in a wider context by the whole shipyards work-force. Why have the shipyards been chosen as a show of force for the government’s determination to stem the financial haemorrhage caused by State subsidies? This is all well in so far as it goes but it definitely does not go far enough.
Who is going to address the far more severe over manning that still remains in the public sector? The fact that this overmanning is camouflaged by direct budget expenditure votes rather than isolated as subsidy to State enterprises does not make it any less serious.
It is in fact far more serious than the shipyards’ problem. At least the shipyard workers used to punch in for work, work a few hours of the punched-in time and earn some foreign currency for the State. Many of the surplus workers in the public sector do not even care to punch in or out, do not bother to work at all and produce absolutely nothing.
In the interest of fairness the labour re-structure programme for the public sector cannot start and end with the shipyards. And it would be wrong to continue relying on early retirement schemes as a viable solution for public sector downsizing. This is expensive and unproductive. We cannot bring about efficiency if we continue to allocate substantial scarce resources to motivate people to drop out of the workforce.
Furthermore, as I have long been arguing, it is atrocious social discrimination for the State to allocate so much resources to free itself of unneeded labour resources while leaving totally unprotected those citizens who lose their jobs through redundancy in private sector enterprises.
Those who profess social democracy, including political parties, the unions and the Church just cannot pretend that it is OK to create such gross discrimination between citizens who work in the public sector and those who work in the private sector. Resources have to be fairly allocated to balance the rights and protection among all citizens who equally contribute taxes on their earned incomes whether earned from public employment or private enterprise.
If we have financial resources to oil the re-structuring process these should not be applied to pay excess resources in the public sector to opt out of the labour market. They should be applied to re-train excess labour resources, whether in the public or in the private sector, to learn new skills to facilitate the transition to new productive jobs.
This is what social justice demands. This is what good economic management demands. Resources applied on re-training will be repaid through economic growth generated when the re-trained resources are placed into productive jobs. On the contrary resources spent on putting people out of the labour market will simply produce more demands as these people claim their rights in social support schemes.
Yet in the face of all this social injustice everyone seems to have lost interest in protecting private sector employees by insisting on fair re-balancing of workers rights and obligations across the whole labour market. Everyone seems blind to the plight of those who are being forced to retire early from private sector jobs not because they chose any cash bundle through some early retirement scheme but because at their advanced age with out-dated skills they have no chance of finding a new job in an economy which is losing jobs at a faster rate than it is creating them.
The plight of these middle aged redundant former private sector employees who daily lament “why me?” remains unheard by those who have the social responsibility to do better.
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