The last time I looked, Malta was not a Dickensian hell-hole in the Mediterranean with Scrooge-like bosses working their employees to the death. Granted, there are the occasional infringements of workers’ rights but there are legal avenues of redress and it’s not as if the country is dotted by sweatshops where people work their fingers to the bone, while their slave-driver employers cracked their whips across their bent backs.

So, yes, the situation isn’t perfect but it’s not beyond the pale. However, judging by the trade unions’ reaction to some perfectly reasonable proposals by the Malta Employers’ Association, you would think the working conditions in Malta were on a par with those in Bangladeshi work houses.

The unions kicked up a mighty fuss when the MEA suggested that perhaps it was a bit cheeky for employees to expect to get paid sick leave if they couldn’t turn up for work with a hangover after a massive booze-up.

The MEA went a bit further and suggested that conditions such as sunburn or sports injuries may also not qualify for paid leave.

Now I am quite sure it would be impossible to enforce the ban on paid sick leave for self-induced conditions.

Employees would simply lie about the cause of their ailments. A thumping headache, fuzzy eyes and inability to walk in a straight line?

Nobody is going to admit that it’s the result of a night out on the tiles. Doctors will have no way of establishing the real cause of the ailment. So it would never work out in practice.

Still I was taken aback by the ferocity of the unions’ reaction to what appears to be an eminently reasonable proposition – that workers should be responsible for their actions and not expect to be subsidised by their employer.

It seems that many people – and especially unions – have a totally mistaken impression of what private enterprise is about.

An employer is well within his rights in requiring his employees to turn up at work punctually and in their senses

There’s this widely-shared belief that employers are fat cats who set up a business solely for the purpose of fattening their pockets and mistreating workers who are always at the bottom of the food chain.

Any call for increased application or attention on the workplace is seen as a grievous threat to workers’ rights.

If anybody points out that a worker not turning up for work because he’s sloshed is a burden on his employer, he’s branded as being heartless.

But these people just don’t get it, do they? Someone sets up a business and takes on employees with the hope and objective of turning a profit.

Naturally, this should be done within the parameters of the law and respecting workers’ rights, but an employer is well within his rights in requiring his employees to turn up at work punctually and in their senses.

He is under no obligation to subsidise them if they don’t show up and don’t contribute to the enterprise by means of their labour.

After all, this is the private sector and not the bloated public sector where it is practically impossible to penalise sloppiness or laziness.

Trying to survive and thrive in the cut-throat competitive business environment is hard enough already; struggling to do so while your own employees sabotage your efforts is even worse.

It’s no wonder that budding entrepreneurs give up in despair. It’s all due to the mentality whereby unions mistake employers for babysitters of hungover workers.

• After a few hours in near total darkness during the power outage, the jokes about Boiler Number Seven petered out and it ceased to be amusing.

A fault is understandable, and perhaps unavoidable, but the complete information blackout as to the cause of the outage or when power would be restored is inexcusable.

So is the lack of an ancillary power supply at the airport – causing the rerouting of certain flights. In another country, heads would roll. As it is, we’ll probably have to make do with sighing in relief that it’s over for now.

cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt