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Prof. Edward Zammit explains why a lot of fuss is being made of the Working Time Directive’s opt-out clause, once again turning the working class into the fetish of the political class
Karl Marx would be rolling in his grave having to hear the plight of European workers, the ones he so believed would rise up against the capitalist class, under the weight of the European Commission’s bid to retain the opt-out clause – allowing workers to sign an agreement with their employers to work beyond the maximum 48-hour week.
In the European Parliament, the socialists, greens and communists have managed to uphold the demands in a report drawn up by Spanish MEP Alejandro Cercas (PES) to remove the opt-out: because of the implications of health and safety for workers, the tentative abuses at the hands of employers who want their workers to work more.
The main opposition – and that includes Malta and its five MEPs (or maybe four and a bit after John Attard Montalto’s enigmatic vote) – is the EPP-ED, which wants the opt-out retained.
In Malta, there is wide consensus on the issue: government, parties, unions and employers are in favour of retaining the opt-out, and allowing workers to work as much overtime to their heart’s content. The Nationalists say it is a worker’s right to have the liberty to choose how much he or she can punish their body with overtime at the factory. The employers say they cannot be competitive without having their workers pack in the hours. The unions say their members want to work. Simple.
Indeed, the Maltese work ethic is surprisingly exemplary. For a nation of nefarious tax evaders, civil servants in zero-productive departments, and dole card-carrying entrepreneurs, the island’s workers want to be true Stakhanovites, as the Soviet Union duly decorated those shock-workers who emulated the example of Aleksei Stakhanov, who mined 102 tonnes of coal in less than six hours – 14 times his quota, bless.
Oxford alumnus Edward Zammit, the industrial relations expert and sociologist, says the Maltese are still in what seems to be like the throes of a materialist destiny. “The thing that worries most people is their standard of living. As a country, our standard compares well with other countries. In a general way, our lifestyle is ‘higher’ than what one would expect, but this is principally the result of work – the Maltese work a lot. We have a strong tradition of work, and the reason is that we know that where this work ethic will decrease, our standard of living will decrease.
“Culturally, you have to remember that there was a lot of poverty in Malta. Within living memory, one has to add. Until the fifties, there was a lot of poverty, not only in the streets, but also in terms of insecurity. So, work is something the Maltese care for a lot. Take for example the migrants of the fifties and the sixties – they would migrate in search of work, thousands of them. Now that the standard of living has been increasing for the past thirty, forty years, our level of expectation is that this standard of living can only increase further, and that forms the basis of our work ethic.
“The education system in Malta is still tied to getting a job, the better qualified the more the income potential. Education is therefore geared towards earning more money, not really quality of life in the sense of pursuing art and culture.”
Zammit, 64, was the first person to be appointed lecturer in sociology at the Department of Economics. Today he runs the Workers Participation Development Centre at the University of Malta.
The Working Time Directive is in the midst of deep divisions across the European Parliament, but Zammit smiles wryly about the panic being dispensed onto concerned workers about the future of overtime by the political parties.
“There is a great panic being made about the directive. The directive, if the opt-out is indeed removed, will not impede workers from taking up another job beyond a maximum 48-hour limit. They just cannot work in the same job. The directive as proposed by the European Parliament just prohibits employers from having their employees working beyond the 48-hour week.”
And there. But not only. Even if the Cercas report is indeed approved in the final reading in Parliament, the Council of Ministers will have to decide whether it will endorse its proposals or not – and the UK and Germany are already signalling their thumbs-down, joined by most of the new Member States, industrious Malta included.
Farcically, the history of the opt-out clause in Malta is another slice of Malta-style scaremongering. Labour MP Joe Brincat warned in 2003 that EU membership would bring an end to overtime. Simon Busuttil, still in political puberty as the MIC chief, countered with denial. Now he is elected in the name of the Maltese to keep the opt-out clause intact. Not only, the PN is making sure everyone knows that Louis Grech and John Attard Montalto muddled up their votes on the Cercas report, with Attard Montalto abstaining on the final resolution, despite allegedly having agreed with the rest of the Maltese posse to vote against his socialist colleague’s report. And to boot, it is the Nationalists who today claim are the guardians of the proletariat.
“It is debatable as to whether the retention of the opt-out is in favour of workers’ rights,” Zammit says. “I agree with you that the discourse is indeed volatile. When one mentions liberty, you can agree with allowing people the liberty to work and rest as they wish. However, there are many ways in which somebody may be constrained to work more. The Commission is in fact proposing that such abuse should be safeguarded against, prohibiting employers from refusing work to people who will not work more than 48 hours. In practice, this can be abused.”
Zammit says the Working Time Directive indeed does not even affect the actual labour patterns of Maltese society. “If you take a look at the different sectors in Malta, only mining and quarrying constitutes the only sector in which workers have done more hours beyond the 48-hour week, with 51.6 hours. The second in line is hotels and restaurants, with 43 hours, still far away from the maximum limit. What is interesting is management. They really pack in the hours. So do the police and airline pilots.
“Then there are other sectors such as professionals like medical doctors, but mainly junior doctors who work 60-hours shifts, or rather they are on-call during these sixty hours, which means they could be inactive, or sleeping, during those hours.
“Then there is the question of the reference period, the weekly average of hours worked throughout the entire year. This has to be negotiated, meaning do you calculate the weekly average on the basis of a twelve-month period, therefore lowering the weekly average of hours? If the reference period is wide, it will not really affect us.”
What Zammit debates is whether removing the opt-out would open the way up for more unemployed workers to fill in the gaps. “That was tried principally in France, when in the eighties the maximum week was reduced to 35 hours. It didn’t work. Work is not created with these measures, but by having a competitive economy. There are those who say it was negative because certain enterprises lost competitiveness. Actually unemployment increased, so the measure remains debatable.”
The French had even hoped that the spill-over effect of less hours would mean more people enjoying, and spending more, in recreation. “I think workers will have less money to spend anyway if they work less,” Zammit says.
“The argument that is always brought in Malta is that our level of development does not afford doing away with the opt-out. Although unions would wish less hours of work, this does not mean the free hours will translated into leisure – instead there will be more time for other work. In a way it is understandable – it is a small country, and our tourism levels are just some 100,000 less than Cyprus’s yearly 1.3 million for a population of 600,000 on a landmass much greater than Malta. They can take that kind of development. So how do we cope with such a higher density of tourism? Work: part-time work and seasonal labour. Most tourism work is part-time and seasonal, done by people who are usually civil servants, or teachers for example.”
What is curious in the case of the retention of the opt-out, is what Zammit calls a “rare” national consensus.
“The unions are very conscious of the demands of their members, and right now workers are fighting for overtime, so unions won’t go against their wishes. Right now there is a rare national agreement between unions, employers and two political parties on retaining the opt-out.
“Abroad there is also the question of long distances to travel to and from your workplace, taking away valuable time from spending it with your family. In Malta, this does not exist. You have time for your family, or actually going on to another job. When you contrast this with the disadvantage of the costs of procuring raw material, there is compensation in terms of the flexibility with which workers can work more. So this is something that cannot be affected by the Directive – our island is small and has more flexibility.”
As Zammit notes, unions in Malta are characterised by their demands – less hours of work and increase in wages. “In terms of health and safety, unions give it much lip service, but we are still backwards on that issue.”
Zammit believes the way out of the Working Time feud is to emulate the UK example, “not really that of giving liberty to everyone to do what they want, but rather allow the unions to do sectoral agreements, keeping in mind the different circumstances for each sector, including the number of hours worked. In Malta, it is traditional to have either a national agreement at the level of MCESD, or rather at the enterprise level.”
With unionism still strong in Malta, enjoying high levels of membership and strong media visibility, Zammit notes that danger does lie ahead for unions mainly represented in particular sectors.
“The restructuring that is currently happening, and which will intensify because it is essential, is creating an economic overhaul in those sectors where the unions have been traditionally strong – big industry, metal industries, principally ship-repair, and the public sector where a lot of privatisation is happening. They now have to adapt to these circumstances, where these companies are becoming smaller. The GWU’s membership is also declining. Remember the Drydocks was the backbone of the union, and now it no longer is the largest industry. ST Microelectronics is even larger.”
They also face a demand to get in line, in some way or another, with the sacrifices of having to put together a social pact. Whilst Zammit notes that unions still do not emphasise enough the need for the workers to increase their training and become more competitive (Zammit says Malta is amongst the most backwards in the EU in terms of access to vocational training for workers), it should be up to them to open their members’ eyes, and show them how to become more employable by training more.
“Otherwise all that militancy is useless to keep jobs which are no longer competitive.”
It is here that he says that the MCESD talks needed more time to hammer out an agreement. The MCESD came close to national agreement, but this did not happen. “The government was coming close to holding the Budget, and had to decide after giving so many chances for agreement to come about. The effect of this was that employers felt they had arrived somewhere. The unions did not. Ideally, these negotiations have to happen long before Budget day. In fact that is what happened in this case, but maybe not too far away from Budget day.”
So maybe there is no social pact yet, but actually, Zammit says a virtual agreement does exist. Last year, the wage increases were less than the increase in inflation. As always, the unions and employers will negotiate.
“Quid pro quo. If unions accept that wages do not increase, what will workers get in return? There is always vocational training courses. There is also curbing the price increase, which is done through a tripartite price control council, because the cost of living is really one of the most directly affecting phenomena. Or they get some security: they get to keep their jobs.”
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