Tony Zarb is Right and Wrong

13^Th October 2006

The Malta Independent - Friday Wisdom

During a meeting of the General Workers’ Union Central Administration held last Wednesday, Tony Zarb and his crew received a unanimous vote of confidence by acclamation. One might argue that a secret vote would have been more credible but a vote of confidence is a vote of confidence, whatever its style.

Tony Zarb told his faithful that: “Their intention was to destroy the GWU, aided by former members who used to leak confidential information to the Nationalist media and their allies. I smell the Nationalist Party behind this plan to destroy the GWU.”

Tony Zarb is right. The PN has been pursuing a long-term plan of dismantling the GWU brick by brick. The plan has now arrived in its final execution stages by pushing the GWU in a one-way route to self-destruct.

The PN’s plan has as its lynchpin the election to GWU leadership of people who have no leadership skills, who don’t know the distinction between strategy and tactics, and whose only credentials for their position is cheap demagoguery.

By giving this type of “militant” leadership to the GWU, the PN has helped the GWU to self-destruct brick by brick so that the GWU has now been turned into a commercially-fragile organisation and in the field of industrial relations, the GWU has maintained its freedom to bark but no possibility to bite.

Following the mishandling of the Sea Malta affair, where the union had misused its power due to lack of strategic vision, there is no way that the GWU can today order a national strike, the sort Anglu Fenech last led successfully in 1995 on the VAT issue.

Tony Zarb said “The government must tell us: What will happen to shipyard workers after subsidies cease in 2008, to workers at Maltacom, Enemalta, and in the ailing tourism sector?”

In due course, the government will obviously tell us, but what will happen then? An issa daqshekk type of street protest and life goes on? The current union leadership describes itself as militant? Where is its militancy when it is allowing private sector employees to have practically no protection against redundancies and has obtained no adequate compensation for the vast majority of workers from the erosion of standard of living caused by the sharp increase in utility bills? Or is militancy only a brand?

The PN know how to break the GWU brilliantly. Tony Zarb told his delegates that last October they “had got rid of those people whom the Nationalist Party had wanted at the union’s helm”. Absolutely wrong! The PN are scared to death that people with strategic vision should reach the helm of the GWU. The PN are much more comfortable with the militants than with the moderates.

In fact they destroy the moderates in the sweetest and most effective way by praising and applauding them publicly. There is nothing more damaging to an aspiring chip on the left of Maltese political spectrum than being praised by the PN. If they hurl insults at you and try to assassinate your character they would be in fact enhancing your popularity among the basic left-wing turf. If they praise or applaud you they know as sure as night follows day that they kill your chances of making it to anywhere.

It’s comical, but that’s how it works. I should know as I have been through it all the way. My political ambitions were not killed by internal obstruction. They were killed gently, gently by the PN and their affiliates, by projecting an image that I could be better than the incumbent here or had more expertise than the other incumbent there.

So when the PN used their media machine to define George Abela, Manuel Micallef, Josephine Attard Sultana, Karmenu Vella, etc as moderates they were not helping them to gain the seats of power within the GWU. They were effectively ensuring that the militants, long on words but short on wisdom, stay comfortably in their posts presiding over the GWU’s operation self-destruct.

The tragedy of this situation for the left side of Malta’s politics can only be properly understood if current events are placed in a historical context. Mintoff had attempted to re-balance the excess of power held by the PN, being a political cell in a wider network of power spanning the business organisations, the media, the professions, the Church and much more, by building a strategic alliance with the GWU whom he privileged with lucrative commercial positions, mostly cosy money-printing commercial monopolies in the ports, in the insurance sector and in the Maltese language print media sector. Clearly, the scope was for the GWU to channel back these easy money flows to the Labour Party so as to reduce its disadvantage on having to compete with the PN in the political arena in a very non-levelled playing field, as the PN clearly had easy access to much wider financial resources.

Weak leadership in the GWU blew up this clever Mintoff strategy. Instead of running a lean and mean ship to ensure that a large part of their cash flows sink to the bottom line in order to beef up Labour’s resources, they were wasted in internal inefficiencies. Now that the PN has gradually destroyed the easy monopolies left as legacy, the GWU is left to nurse huge commercial inefficiencies which cannot survive the loss of their monopoly profits, leaving the GWU financially fragile.

By helping the GWU to destroy itself, the PN are indirectly weakening their main political adversary, the MLP, as they keep enjoying huge advantage in playing the political game on a financially very non-levelled playing field.