A proposal by the two main political parties enabling parents to utilise their sick leave when children are unwell has raised fears that it will adversely impact Malta’s competitiveness.
Employers were the most vociferous, saying they could never agree to a measure that encouraged absence from work rather than presence and higher productivity.
The idea was first mooted by Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, who argued that the measure would discourage abuse because working parents would be aware that they might need the entitlement should their children get ill.
In addition, he felt the system would also increase loyalty towards one’s employer. He said that the proposal received an overwhelming support by thousands of parents.
It emerged on Wednesday that the same proposal had been included in the Labour Party’s plans. Both parties argue that employers stand to gain because it would help reduce abuse related to sick leave.
The Malta Employers Association’s general director, Joe Farrugia, said the organisation was open to discussion but employers would be more prone to accepting a culture change in family-friendly measures rather than rigidity and changes in legislation.
While measures such as childcare centres helped promote and encouraged presence at work, the sick leave proposal encouraged parents to stay away from work.
Stressing that the announced measure was vague and needed to be explained in more detail, Mr Farrugia said absence from work meant money to employers. “There’s no two ways about it.”
He said the law already provided for urgent family and parental leave when such situations arose.
Sociologist Godfrey Baldacchino, chairman of the board of the University’s Centre for Labour Studies (CLS), said that while such a measure would avoid parents lying about the real reason why they were reporting sick, it was likely to increase the overall amount of sick leave with its corresponding effect on output and overall firm competitiveness.
He explained that a CLS study in 2008 showed that while the average days lost per employees per year stood at 3.32 days in the private sector, this climbed to a staggering 8.34 days in the public sector.
“The issue does not appear to me to be one of abuse but of a steep differential between private and public sector practices,” he said.
In the Maltese social context, and among those dual-earner families where the female had the less well-paying job, as well as in single-parent families, this stay-at-home parent was likely to be the mother.
“Yet, Maltese working men, on average, report higher rates of sick leave than Maltese working women,” he said.
Prof. Baldacchino argued that staying at home with a sick child was “no big deal” for certain occupation classes like professional grades where work could be flexibly organised and where working from home was tolerated and encouraged.
Even workers representatives are wary of such a proposal. GWU general secretary Tony Zarb said that while, in isolation, such a proposal was “a plus” for workers, employers had already expressed concern with the union.