Letters | Sunday, 07 December 2008

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Quo Vadis, Mube?

Workers’ participation is hardly a hot topic for public debate in Malta. However, I cannot let William Portelli’s position, as president of the Union of Bank Employees, MUBE, regarding Government’s decision to remove the worker-director from the Bank of Valletta Board of Directors, pass uncommented.
He gives the impression of being objective and reasonable when he defends government’s decision as “understandable… in times like these”, clearly referring to the current (international) financial turmoil. However, both government and the local banks have declared that we have no such financial crisis. Why then defend this retrograde decision (as it has been repeatedly described) on the basis of the financial crisis? Such a decision, we now learn, had already been taken a year ago. So, the current international financial crisis is merely a pretext. Mr John Dalli, Minister for Social Policy, has only recently warned against and condemned such excuses.
Besides the financial crisis, government has given “the national interest” and the “overarching needs of the bank” as the reasons for its decision. Such talk seems to echo what we hear in the news about other governments within the EU intervening on banks which have been badly hit by the crisis. In such cases, government intervention was meant to prop up these banks financially and not to interfere in their internal organization and structure. Even if our banks were in a precarious financial situation (which everybody here agrees is not the case) government would still not be acting like its European counterparts by taking decisions to interfere in the running of our banks.
Mr Portelli argues that he kept silent about the matter because “government kept its word to keep the worker-director for another year”. This raises the suspicion whether this silence was agreed mutually by the two parties. If so, what a way to go about reducing the workers’ rights! It confirms what has been claimed by Fr Peter Serracino-Inglott (The Sunday Times, 23/11, p.11) on the same topic, that “the saddest aspect of the government’s current intention is that … this reversal is being effected almost surreptitiously, …in obfusc fashion”. The worker-directors of other companies in which the government was a substantial shareholder, e.g. Air Malta, Maltacom and Mid-Med Bank itself, were also withdrawn in similar circumstances.
Another curious argument is that if the government’s decision was resisted, then the union would have had to apply equal pressure on the other banks! This is an insult to BOV members of his union. Why should an employees’ union find objection with a right enjoyed by employees in one company and not in another? If anything, the position at BOV serves as a model for others to emulate. This is the case in many European states (both developed and not-so-developed one may add) who have adopted workers’ participation as a European value entrenched in the European Social Model. It is a model that enhances the meaning of democracy by empowering stakeholders (not only shareholders) in the decision-making process at the workplace and is backed by specific legislation as well as voluntary practices.
The fact the Mr Portelli feels that “we work well with other banks without a worker-director” shows that he is not in synch with his counterparts in most other European states. Unless somebody feels uncomfortable, or worse insecure, with having worker-directors around, workers’ participation at the decision-making level should be a value to strive for and not to be bargained according to convenience at the negotiating table!
Lastly, there is the almost unbelievable statement that at board level “there is a lot of secret information being passed around”. The meaning here is quite ambiguous because we are talking of a serious financial institution, whose operations are monitored by the Financial Services Authority, and not some obscure company dealing in secret operations! It also begs the question what type of secret information this is that requires to be hidden from a worker-director and not from the other directors. One wonders then, whether such secret information concerns the well-being and working conditions of staff.
The role of the worker-director, like that of the other directors, is that of promoting the company’s long-term vision and strategy, albeit from a workers’ perspective. As a major stakeholder in the company, a worker-director has to be loyal to the company that provides him with his/her livelihood as well as that of the workers he/she represents. The role is quite different from that of a trade-union and therefore it should not be considered a threat to a company’s well-being and objectives.
On a higher plane, this issue is ‘most worrying’ because, as “the minister has made it clear to us, it was government policy”. Such policy goes contrary to all the high moral values of social dialogue and participation that characterised the outlook of the party in government in the 80s and 90s. Since then the government has become so obsessed with free-market liberalization, privatization, deficit control, dismantling of subsidies and other neo-liberal economic moves that it has lost most of its avant-guard social bearing and with it the support of open-minded progressives who recognize the European social model as the way forward to a more genuinely democratic future.
Let us not forget that the current financial crisis with the accompanying economic downturn is very much the result of laissez-faire and deregulatory policies in the name of free-market competition that have given globalization a bad name. Let us also hope that this change in policy is not a signal to the type of foreign investment that, in the words of Percy Barnevick, President of ABB, a transnational company, wants “the freedom to invest where and as long it wishes, to produce what it wishes, to buy and sell wherever it wishes, and all the while putting up with as little labour laws and social convention constraints as possible.”

Joe Abdilla
Tarxien

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