Heading for the wrong berth

The Drydocks die is cast. The government will press ahead to try to privatise it, whether or not it reaches an agreement on how to do it with the General Workers' Union.

My emphasis is on 'try to', because I do not believe as yet that satisfactory privatisation will definitely happen. There will be interest from private operators in ship repair, the Manoel Island yacht yard, super yacht services and the Marsa shipbuilding facility. Whether the government is going about courting that interest in the right way, is another matter.

Tackle the union issue first. The GWU would be fighting a lost battle if it thought it could somehow block privatisation. The various models tried out since the Dockyard was no longer required by the Admiralty, have not worked. That's an obvious statement. Less obvious is, why? The GWU focuses on recent experience and points an accusing finger at massive losses piled up due, it says, to a management cock-up.

The government has not really replied to that one. Even if it does, the route ahead still lies in privatisation.

But the union, the 'yard workers and the taxpayers have a right to know exactly what has taken place. The authorities can satisfy that right without jamming up the privatisation-attempt process.

That process, to repeat, will not be halted. Even the opposition has explicitly indicated that privatisation may be the way forward. Setting the record straight is necessary as a basis to move on along the privatisation path. If private bidders feel that managers and other workers are not up to scratch, they will not want to take on any of them. That cannot be what the government intends, not if it is in its right political and economic mind.

What exactly it is that the government intends is not at all easy to define. The finance minister has claimed that experts have advised that no more than 450 to 700 workers - say 650, then, and stop being coy, minister - will be required to run the four major facilities offered by the drydocks complex.

Which experts? When? On what basis did they reach their conclusion? The GWU is signalling its suspicion that what the government really means is that privatisation with identified interests is a done deal, which will be imposed, full stop. I think not. The government, rather strangely, seems to have expert advice which effectively says that all that the political administration has done over the past five years has been wrong.

The plan, defined and executed, was to trim the drydocks workforce to 1,700 to achieve sustainability. The trimming was done. Now unknown experts say that no more than around 650 workers can be sustained in employment with the existing facilities. How could the government have got it so wrong, and why does it not be frank about admitting it?

Moving forward without details makes the figure of a workforce of some 650 appear as if it was plucked out of the air, whether thin or thick. How can the experts and the government tell what the business plan of any private operators who show an interest will be? And what does that average figure represent in terms of skills?

It has been suggested by experience that the slimmed 1,700 workforce proved to be inadequate in terms of skills balance, with the result that temporary balancing workers have been sourced from abroad. Such real working experience should suggest that interested parties had best be left to their devices. They, no one else, should say how many workers they would require, and how segmentised in terms of skills.

By jumping the gun the government could be prejudicing its own effort to privatise the drydocks. It seems to be putting the cart before the horse. To be sowing the seeds of yet another mistake.

In the process, it is contradicting itself. If it does prove to be the case that some 1,000 jobs have to be shed, by offering a pay-off to those affected the government would be perpetrating the practice of unequal treatment of those who lose their jobs.

That aside, to offer early retirement is to contradict the government's own pension reform, which requires working longer and not retiring early, so that they can continue to fund the social security system through longer-term NI payments.

In the coming weeks it is likely that a new stand-off between the government and the GWU will steal the headlines. That would be a barren outcome.

What is required is, first of all, to define the drydocks in a corporate sense, to give a distinct corporate form to its four activities - ship repair, building, yacht repair and yacht maintenance. Then to decide now what facilities are to be allocated to them, in terms of land, docks, access, and the like.

Then - and only then - to call for expressions of interest in respect of the four main sectors of activity. Those interested should be able to apply for more than one unit, for there could be complementarity. But it should be left to them to say, in the process, how many employees they would require, and skilled in what.

Once that is established the government would be free to discuss terminal benefits for those workers who would lose their job, should that be its political wish. But the way it's going about it so far is to cast anchor before land is in sight. That is not the way to bring the battered drydocks ship to some reasonably safe port.