Editorial

There was a time in Malta when the very idea of job mobility was anathema to some unions and incomprehensible to many workers. These were more interested in security of tenure - for all of their working life. Such an attitude created a rigid workforce which looked askance even at the thought of flexibility in the sense of being moved from an over-manned area of operations to one that was undermanned in the same organisation.

It was very much the case in the civil service and the dockyard where an arthritic system of work practice prevented the first from achieving efficiency and the second from overcoming massive debt problems. It has taken decades for both to take on the challenges posed by globalisation. In the private sector the bitter encounter with market reality has taken place, and is still taking place, with a better understanding of what is required. A job is no longer for life and life is no longer lived in the same working environment.

When the time came for Malta to enter the European Union there were those who foretold that entry would mean any number of things, all of them risky. Maltese workers would lose their jobs as hordes descended from the four corners of the Union upon this island and snatched livelihoods away from the Maltese. Italian restaurateurs would spell the death-knell to the locally owned and run eating establishments. Even AIDS would be given a free ride on the coat tails of Malta's membership.

The counter argument to this doom-laden scenario was that Maltese workers, in the widest definition of that word, looking for new pastures for their talents would have vast opportunities opened up to them. In analysis carried in this newspaper a few days ago it was shown that one million job vacancies are published on the European Employment Services (Eures) website, which is fed by 30 public employment services in Europe.

Given the openness of the labour market, the possibility of a brain drain always existed. Of 55 doctors who graduated in 1999, only six have remained in Malta. In this context of labour emigration, be it doctors or drivers, it is surprising there are still no official statistics to show just how many Maltese have left the island for a more financially rewarding job abroad.

Financial reward, of course, needs to be placed in a new socio-economic context with all that this entails. Those who are engaged as drivers for coach companies (a UK recruitment manager remarked that those he interviewed "seemed to have a fantastic work ethic") earn £20,000 a year. This sounds good. It is by no means as paradisiacal as it sounds. If it were, British coach drivers would not have relinquished the job in the first place.

However, the point is that Maltese men and women are taking advantage of EU membership to start new lives in new destinations; London, Brussels, The Hague, Dublin and Madrid, to name but five. The experience will be as good or as bad as the talent they bring to their job and the strength of their pioneering instinct in the battle for survival in a foreign country.

What is not arguable, though, is surely the fact that given talent and language, skill and determination, EU membership has created a whole new ball game in job mobility. The latter is no longer anathema. It is a practical necessity that is slowly but surely being understood and exploited to the point that it is not an influx of foreign labour that we face but a brain drain.