The whistle blowers

Several calls have been made in vain to safeguard the position of local council secretaries, who are employed on fixed-term contracts. The president of the Association of Local Councils Executive Secretaries (ASKLM), Adrian Mifsud, speaks to Rosanne Zammit about the need to review the Local Councils Act for the sake of good governance.

Sipping espresso while looking at the sea in Ta' Xbiex, Mr Mifsud speaks of the problems and challenges executive secretaries are facing and hopes it will not be long before the situation is resolved.

Local council elections will be held next week. For some executive secretaries, this can mean there will be a new mayor who will not renew their contract simply because he does not like them.

"Executive secretaries are in a somewhat awkward position. We are council employees but we have the task of reporting our employer - the council - in cases of any maladministration. So we have to take a calculated risk whenever we make a decision, since it might mean losing our job."

This situation cannot continue and a solution must be found sooner rather than later, Mr Mifsud insisted.

While executive secretaries should be whistle blowers, they should not put their job on the line in order to be so. After all, everyone had a family to look after.

Mr Mifsud said that over the past 13 years of local government experience in Malta, there had been at least 225 executive secretaries who had fallen by the wayside - some were dismissed, others left and some just lost interest.

Executive secretaries are employed with councils on a three-year contract and when this expires, councils can fire and hire anew.

This procedure has been criticised by the Ombudsman, the Auditor General, the compilers of an operations review on local government and also the compilers of a Council of Europe report on local democracy in Malta.

All concluded that this situation should be rectified but it seemed that the current state suited political parties, and they did not want to change it.

The problem was that once an executive secretary's contract was not renewed, the secretary was out of work and had to start registering for employment. Unlike their counterparts in Italy, executive secretaries did not have a job in the civil service to fall back on even on a temporary basis until they found another job.

Although discussions with the then minister responsible for local government some six years ago had led to the drafting of a legal notice to amend the Human Resources Regulations, the proposal was flatly turned down by the Local Councils Association.

Last June, a petition signed by serving executive secretaries was presented to Home Affairs Minister Tonio Borg but no reaction was forthcoming other than a non-committal press release. However, the minister, through the Department of Local Government, was recently involved in a case where the newly-elected Pietà council opted to terminate the executive secretary's employment half way through his contract. The dismissal process was halted, but only because the executive secretary resorted to legal action.

Mr Mifsud said that although the legal responsibility of executive secretaries carried a lot of weight, they were not given any backing by the powers that be.

First and foremost, councillors had to understand that secretaries did not want power. "Our job is not a struggle for power. We do not chase power, but we have certain obligations we have to fulfil. "It is inhuman that the risk of doing our job well is unemployment."

Unfortunately, executive secretaries sometimes ended up without a job just because the mayor wanted to employ a particular person. To add insult to injury, they did not have the right to contest a decision to dismiss them. And as executive secretaries were not on an indefinite contract, many could not take a bank loan.

Councillors, Mr Mifsud said, seemed to believe that executive secretaries were there to stop them and put obstacles in their path. But this was not the case. The prevailing situation was leading to the unhappy state whereby some executive secretaries were unable to fully perform their duties due to pressure from the elected members.

"We need the proper tools with which to deliver. It is a question of having good administration even at local government level," Mr Mifsud said. Councils' finances, for example, were the responsibility of the executive secretary, who was the financial, executive and administrative head. However, an executive secretary could not stop a council from carrying out a project because of lack of funds. In such an instance, it is the duty of executive secretaries to report their council to the government.

The responsibilities of executive secretaries were approved by Parliament and it was now the duty of parliamentarians, as legislators, to ensure they were given the necessary space in which to function.

According to the Industrial Relations Act, the position of an employee on a fixed-term contract automatically became permanent after four years. But since this did not apply to the public sector, it did not apply to executive secretaries. Mr Mifsud said this clause was not in accordance with EU legislation and, when all the action taken locally proved futile, the association felt it was left with no option but to lodge a complaint with the European Commission. The government told the Commission it was amending the law and that the amendments had been prepared but it needed to consult the social partners.

The Commission, Mr Mifsud said, had issued warning letters to the government and would soon be publishing its opinion on the matter. This could lead to the Commission taking legal action against the government at the European Court of Justice.

The case was also put to the European Parliament through a petition a year ago. This was expected to go to the Petitions Board in the next few weeks.

Although Mr Mifsud was confident that the situation of executive secretaries would eventually be rectified, he could not understand why they had to go through all this trouble, especially when council executive secretaries in Europe had totally different arrangements. He said executive secretaries should feel secure enough in their job to perform their duties without fear of reprisal.

Moreover, councils should have a good reason to dismiss an executive secretary and executive secretaries should have the right to legally challenge the decision.

Ninety-nine per cent of executive secretaries who ended up jobless, Mr Mifsud said, had been dismissed without a reason. One particular council, he said, had a turnover of 14 executive secretaries since local government was introduced 13 years ago.

Mr Mifsud said that many people who had considered taking up the post of executive secretary were put off when they realised the work it entailed. Although their pay varied between about Lm8,000 and Lm9,600, executive secretaries had more than 550 different tasks to do.

Besides executive secretaries, councils could also employ a worker for every 2,500 people in their locality. Mr Mifsud said such a system was not ideal. In Zurrieq, for example, where Mr Mifsud served as executive secretary, the population was 9,960. Because it was 40 people under 10,000, a fourth person could not be employed.

Part of the problem was that not enough funds had been pumped into councils when they were set up and quality personnel had therefore not been recruited. There were executive secretaries who had the experience but lacked the qualifications and others who had the qualifications but no experience of local government. It took at east nine months in the job to gain the sufficient experience to efficiently manage a council.

Executive secretaries, Mr Mifsud said, should follow a specialised course that would help them deal with their duties as, the end of the day, it was the councils that were losing out.

On a positive note, however, courses were to start being held between the Local Councils Association, the Department of Local Government and ASKLM.

Mr Mifsud is also president of UDITE, the European Federation of CEOs of local government, an organisation with a core membership of 15,000 from all EU member states.