Schools should remain open after lesson time and throughout the holidays to offer non-academic activities, the University’s Centre for Labour Studies said.
Keeping children within school grounds for longer would make it easier for women to join the workforce and better fit the growing trend for both parents to be breadwinners. Forty-three per cent of women in Malta work, compared to the 59 per cent EU average.
The proposal was made in a memorandum the centre sent to the three political parties contesting the election.
It suggested accompanying modified school opening hours with a higher investment in childcare, more workplace flexibility and the introduction of paid paternity leave.
It also cautioned that job creation, although important, “should not be promoted at the expense of job quality”.
“Economic pressures must not serve to create and drive down the quality of jobs,” the study said.
It commended the work done by Malta Employers’ Association in drafting a charter to encourage standardised practices in sectors prone to precarious employment.
Giving workers the opportunity to invest in their own workplace could stimulate productivity, the centre said, suggesting that this could be done if private employers set up a trust fund to pool collective worker shareholding.
It echoed calls for the police to be given the right to join a trade union, noting that other so-called “essential service” personnel, such as doctors and port workers, had been given such right.
The centre said that legal problems emerged when more than one union claimed to represent the majority of workers at any given workplace.
Taking its cue from an International Labour Organisation proposal, it called on political parties to commit themselves to updating the law to allow for joint collective agreements with more than one union being involved. Although progress had been made in matching education to labour market needs, career guidance remained “fragmented” with considerable variations in quality, the centre said.
It suggested setting up a National Career Guidance Centre that would coordinate guidance efforts and professionalise services. Such a centre was first mooted in a 2007 report on career guidance policies in schools.
Irregular migrants’ work skills remained “largely underutilised”, the centre noted, and a greater push was needed to integrate such workers into mainstream work.
It suggested the setting up of a Temporary Work Agency dedicated to achieving this and called on the Government to make it easier for migrants’ academic and work qualifications to be assessed and recognised.