Squeezing Air Malta back in

News stories tend to relate mostly to today and headlines crowd each other out. The tendency reminds one what former US President Lyndon Johnson is reputed once to have said of his vice-president, “He cannot walk straight on the pavement and spit at the same time.” Newspapers are not nearly so bad, but the push of urgent headlines and demand on space do takepriority.

Take the Malta scene in February. Throughout the divorce legislation issue has placed in the background practically everything else, especially in the political headlines and in the letter columns. Never mind that very often politicians were jockeying for political advantage and commentators slipped into the practice of repeating each other.

Never mind either that, for all that the issue continues to be misrepresented. Most assuredly we cannot be discussing whether we are in favour of or against divorce. Who, in his right senses, can be in favour of divorce? Even when zoo-keepers try to mate two animals they would like them to become a happy couple.

Let alone with humans. The issue is not divorce, but divorce legislation. It is not whether couples should divorce willy nilly, but whether, if their marriage has irrevocably broken down in social terms, they should have the right, if they so wished, to dissolve their civil marriagecontract. It is all about a civil arrangement for the civil reordering of a basic civil aspect of civil society.

Instead, far too many politicians and commentators drum away at divorce, divorce, divorce, among other things bringing in the religious aspect of marriage, a matter completely outside the remit of divorce legislation since religious marriages cannot be dissolved. They can be annulled, where the Church judges that extremely strict conditions are satisfied. That is all.

The divorce legislation issue, though badly presented, hogged many headlines and much space. This past week it met stiff competition from a fresh situation – what is happening in Libya, where mercenaries hired by a desperate despotic regime are mowing down civilians, while the regime threatens to purge thousands of households if it manages to hold on to brutal power.

Between them, the divorce-legislation issue and the uprisings in north Africa have squeezed into the background everything else, even the human tragedy that is being enacted at Air Malta.

The national airline has a history of commercial success mingled with political abuse and, more recently, commercial failure. After two decades of positive results, despite the local and foreign odds, the company began losing money from 2003 on.

Efforts to turn it round where stymied by incorrect decisions – fresh increases in the wage bill though recovery was still only an objective – and an explosion in fuel costs.

Whereas the airline had never received any financial assistance from the government beyond the initial share capital, last year it had to be lent €52 million to remain solvent, subject to a critical restructuring plan.

The public does not know what the draft plan contains. Leaks say, however, that half the Air Malta workforce must go, and that the government is trying to identify alternative employment in the public sector.

Input to the bare public airing of the issue elicited differing opinions by two respected economists. One said it would be an economic mistake to transfer redundant workers to the bloated public sector. The other said the transfer should be made since the more output there is, the better. In reality, it is correct to say that transferring redundancy from one location to the other does not solve the nationalproblem.

Yet the priority has to be the social factor, with economic considerations attached to it. Socially, as various Air Malta employees made clear, the workers to be made redundant need a job, not a golden handshake, which does not take them off the scrap heap. My own view is that we need to retain Air Malta’s trained personnel in the local economy, even at an initial economic cost since their output would, admittedly, be low.

It is a pity that so far the only detail that has emerged relates to excess labour. It colours thepicture beyond a reasonable alternative. To my mind Air Malta should, in stage one, be right-sized to a level compatible with at least breakeven operations of its aircraft and set-up.

In stage two, which should be prepared for in parallel with stage one, efforts should be made to identify how the company could grow again through a critically revised routes network. For that to happen, it would need to be able to take back experienced employees as progress is made.

Other airlines have managed to do this. Why not Air Malta as well? Why talk only of the mistakes of the distant and more recent past when survival requires concentrating on the opportunities there are now and which could be prised open in the near future?

This way forward requires more than a difficult accounting exercise plus a humane political approach conditioned, in part, by foolish promises made by the governing party on the eve of the 2008 election. It requires sharp technical input. Rather than cast away human resources who could give that input, the government should combine them with expatriate expertise seasoned in situations like ours.

This way forward would still leave some sad trail of displaced workers. But it should be quite less than seems to be envisaged now. If we could go down that route, that would be a headline able to compete vigorously with whatever fresh events in the quest to sack dictators and despots could throw up.