When building contractors proceed at breakneck speed, making hay while the sun shines, one would think the number of workers in the construction industry is shooting up by leaps and bounds. Few believe this is not the case but official figures tell a different story: the industry had, in fact, a marginal drop in the number of workers it employed in the year to March.

Of course, it does not take longer than a blink of the eye to realise that, besides the foreign workers the industry employs legally, some contractors take on others who are not. This is part of the new labour market landscape that has been shaping up in recent years but, particularly, since Malta joined the European Union.

Remember the times when Labour politicians used to claim that if Malta were to join the EU, Sicilians would come over and take up the locals’ jobs? All that scaremongering has ironically morphed into an interesting twist in that, rather than “stealing” jobs, foreigners are mainly filling in gaps and taking jobs no longer sought by Maltese. Particularly surprising is the rapidity of the change that is taking place.

Third-country nationals are today taking up many of the elementary, or menial, jobs – street sweepers and rubbish collectors, for example. Step into a restaurant and the likelihood is that the waiters and cleaners are foreign nationals. Even small outlets are today taking on foreign labour. In the words of the employment agency chief, Clyde Caruana, the demand for workers today is exceeding supply.

The number of those out of a job is at a record low, the rate of employment is rising and, again according to the agency chief, they are today getting more job queries from employers than from people wanting to get into the labour market. As he put it, job creation is happening at a phenomenal rate, which explains why the economy is absorbing so many foreign workers.

A recent Central Bank of Malta report gives quite a revealing insight into the expanding labour market. In 2000, there were 900 EU citizens working in Malta. By 2014, the figure shot up to 15,500, which, according to the Bank, more than offset a doubling in the number of third-country nationals. More importantly, and this, too, is an interesting twist, the rise in the number of foreign workers over the past 10 years has not come at the expense of Maltese workers because this has been rising rapidly as well.

It would therefore seem that without foreign labour the island’s economy would have run into some difficulties. A recurring problem, of course, is the hiring of workers illegally. Another is that, while in some sectors and at certain levels of the job market, foreigners may bring with them skills that are in short supply, in others, such as catering, the work standard is low.

In the first five months of this year, labour inspectors flagged no fewer than 887 cases of illegal employment of foreigners, with the first three top nationalities being British (108), Bulgarians (107) and Italians (80). Even more staggering is that the total between January 2012 and May this year was 11,996, including 4,294 foreigners from 110 countries.

Despite the efforts being made to check illegal employment, there is still a great deal of worker exploitation going on, a matter that works against the interest of the individuals taken on illegally and of the economy as, unlike foreigners employed here legally, these do not pay tax and national insurance.

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