Commenting on the present impasse between Government and the unions representing the University’s academic staff, last week’s editorial in this newspaper started off with the well worn-out American cliché that expounds that “if you pay peanuts you get monkeys”.
This maxim may be true in a completely liberalised labour market where employers negotiate salaries with employees on an individual basis, but it utterly fails the test in situations when trade unions insist that all employees of the same grade should be treated equally – which is the case with employees in the civil service and state owned entities like the university. To stretch the metaphor even further, switching the monkeys’ diet from peanuts to caviar will have no effect whatsoever on the behaviour of the monkeys!
A nephew of mine (who is no monkey) and works abroad in the private sector is often the target of poaching attempts by his employer’s competitors. He is frequently lured to switch employer – and allegiances – by the promise of a bigger salary. He invariably tells his boss of what he was offered and his boss invariably pushes up his salary in order to retain his services. This can happen where the monkey/peanut environment really exists. It can never happen in the public sector, whether in Malta or abroad.
This country has had innumerable reforms involving salary structures in the civil service and within parastatal entities. In spite of the verbal hype accompanying them, the harsh truth is that increases in salaries do not produce increases in efficiency and in production. Everybody takes the rise, adjusts his or her standard of living to the new reality and then keeps on doing (or not doing) whatever he or she was doing (or not doing) before the rise!
This has happened over and over again in several sectors and yet when claims for salary rises are made, the public is again sold the canard that increases in salaries bring about increases in efficiency and/or production. Perhaps this illusion is continually concocted and re-concocted to make the extra burden on the public exchequer appear less repulsive to the taxpayer who eventually pays the bill, willy-nilly.
Just before the election in March, we had Government’s “historic” agreement with the medical sector. Apart from my perplexity regarding these run of the mill agreements being called “historic”, has anyone noticed a more efficient health service as a result? Are doctors and nurses giving more for getting more? Has the hemorrhage of newly qualified doctors going abroad to further their studies been stemmed? Of course not. The only real tangible effect was in the ever widening deficit in the government’s accounts plus the obvious inducement for professionals in other sectors to ask for more.
If one were to take the university as an example, I am sure that everyone agrees that among the academic staff there are: those who work hard and do their utmost even beyond the all of duty; those whose output is not so hard but who deliver satisfactorily and adequately even though they can put more energy into their efforts; and those who are shirkers and skivers who continually make an effort not to make an effort.
Any salary increases will not alter the equation. The hard-working professors and lecturers will keep working hard; the not-so-hard working ones will keep their output at the same level and the skivers will keep on skiving.
This is the way that human nature acts and one cannot expect otherwise, either at the university or anywhere else where salaries are forked out by the government. However if anybody thinks that an increase in salaries applicable across the board can ever change this situation, he or she must be living in cloud-cuckoo land.
Trade Union membership and work practices preclude a system where hard-working individuals are awarded for their efforts and skivers can actually be fired – and this is why the reference to the monkey/peanut relationship is nonsense.
The introduction of performance bonuses was an attempt at somehow making up for this problem. I am afraid that the initial promise of this system has petered into thin air. The devil, as usual, is in the detail. The assessments of performances are made by fellow civil servants who have to respond for their actions and invariably fail to take the bull by the horns as they find themselves subject to censure and protests by unions defending members claiming that their rating in the performance bonus game was unfair, biased and discriminatory. If it is not unions, it is Members of Parliament defending their constituents! This leads to the assessment of the assessment of the performance bonus rating and so on and so on. In other words, the system got bogged down in the bureaucratic morass that is the civil service.
When I was responsible for Education, I once half-seriously told an MUT delegation that since the Education Department had a dearth of physics and IT teachers, we should follow the market principle of supply and demand and pay teachers of these subjects more than those of other subjects. The union’s reaction was predictable. A teacher is a teacher and every teacher should be treated equally within the agreed salary scales. So someone teaching the alphabet to a six-year old should get paid as much as someone teaching ‘O’ level physics, or even more if the maximum salary had been reached by one but not by the other. I am not in any way denigrating the teachers who teach the alphabet to six-year olds. In fact the country owes them a lot of gratitude for they are responsible for the development of the basic awareness of literacy of our future citizens; and this is certainly no joke. But I am sure that this example says it all.
This does not mean that I think that the salaries of University academics are adequate and are compatible with their responsibilities and there is no case for any increases. But to justify such increases by invoking the empty promise of an enhancement of efficiency or to tout them as some new investment in education is ridiculous.
At best, such increases just make the existing investment more expensive, and so less efficient!