The future of work

According to a study to be published in the UK in the next few weeks, the work prospects for unskilled young, and not so young, workers in the next few years are going to be very bleak indeed.

Two years ago Gordon Brown, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, commissioned Lord Leitch, former chief executive officer of Zurich Financial Services, to review the changes that are expected to happen in the UK jobs market in the next two decades. The findings of this review make very sobering reading.

The British media that has already seen this review are stating that Lord Leitch predicts that in 2020 the number of unskilled jobs in Britain will amount to only 500,000, compared to six million now. The number of highly-skilled posts will rise from the present nine million to 14 million.

Unskilled jobs will disappear as a result of automation and because low-level service-sector jobs will require IT and other skills. What is more worrying for the UK is the fact that at present as many as 35 per cent of Britain's workforce has low skills, compared to only 13 per cent in the US. In America, 49 per cent of workers have intermediate skills, while in Britain only 37 per cent have such skills.

But enough figures for now.

Unfortunately, in Malta we do not have such statistics, at least not in the form in which they can be easily analysed. It will be a fair assumption to say that our situation is not much better than in the UK. The statistics that we have available and, more important, the anecdotal evidence we gather in our contact with families, indicates that our educational system is still churning out young students who do not have the basic skills to make them easily employable in a modern economy.

The present government continues to measure the success in our educational system in terms of the increasing amount of money we spend on education every year, or, more inappropriately, by the number of school refurbishment projects often accompanied by media hype.

However much the Nationalist administration tries to build the feel-good factor in the run up to the next election, the failure of our educational system cannot be written off by promises of brilliant future economic prospects as a result of new investment like that of Smart City. Unless we start to measure our success in the management of our educational system in terms of the employability of young people who go through our educational system we can never exploit the potential of economic well-being which is delivered through new investment.

Our young people need to have a portfolio of skills that goes beyond the traditional literacy and numeric skills. They need to have new skills in IT, communication, problem solving, team working, creativity, entrepreneurship and civic and environmental sensitivity.

These skills are needed for our tourism industry as much as they are needed for our financial services industry. They are needed for the new manufacturing companies we are targeting, as much as they are needed for the caring professions services, which are bound to feature more prominently in our economy in future.

We risk having a two-track system of education in Malta where hard working families who have achieved a certain degree of economic feasibility can overcome the structural inefficiencies of our educational system by paying for extra educational services for their children. On the other hand, we will have equally hard-working families in low-paid employment who are struggling to satisfy the basic need of economic survival and who unfortunately cannot invest their time and money in the proper education of their children because of other more pressing priorities.

A future Labour government will be committed to review the way our educational system works to ensure that proper success benchmarks are adopted by all those involved in educating our young people. We will then ensure that every lira spent on educating our youngsters gives the best value because this is hard-earned taxpayers money.

Most important, we will ensure that every Maltese family will have the opportunity to benefit fully from our educational system by ensuring that economic activity is robust enough to lift the great majority of our families from a state of economic survival to one of prosperity.

Only in this way can we build a more just society based on real equal opportunities for all.

Dr Mangion is MLP deputy leader for parliamentary affairs.