I have a new hero. Last Friday, Stephen Camilleri was handed a two-year prison sentence suspended for four years for theft of ticket money at Fondazzjoni Wirt Artna’s Malta at war museum in Vittoriosa.
At the time of the theft, Camilleri was employed as the museum manager. As reported in Times of Malta, he took to declaring fewer visitors than actually visited, and to pocketing the difference in ticket sales. He told the court that he had a six-year-old daughter, and that his salary of €1,000 a month made it impossible for him to make ends meet.
Fondazzjoni Wirt Artna has a lot of explaining to do. It seems they told the police that Camilleri was one of their finest museum managers, and that they had filed the report “with a heavy heart”. They also said they felt they had no option but to do so.
A rather strange line of reasoning, I find. First, they did have an option, and that was to have a word with Camilleri and to try to understand his situation and motives. The further option would have been to give him a reasonable pay rise.
Second, how fair of them was it to pay one of their best (their words, not mine) museum managers a salary that was well below the national average? No heavy hearts there.
If the trustees at the Fondazzjoni think that it’s fair to pay a museum manager €1,000 a month, I can only say they value forts and towers above their employees’ lives.
They would probably say that they are a not-for-profit organisation, and that their resources are stretched enough as is. I don’t consider that a valid reason. It should be a basic principle of every employer to see to it that people are paid decent salaries. That, or close up shop, heritage or no heritage.
I said earlier that Camilleri is my new hero. And so he is, though the reasons have nothing to do with a general admiration for thieves.
There was a time when poaching was a capital offence. Starvation being what it is, scrawny peasants would still risk the rope in the hope of gleaning some venison off the royal herds. Few today would hold that it was fair to hang poachers. On the contrary, we would rather say that theirs was a strategy for survival, and that it was positively mean of their overlords to expect them to go on a long diet.
By way of a second example, domestic service in India today is undervalued and underpaid. Most servants lead a pretty miserable existence and live in shacks right outside the glitzy apartment blocks where they work.
When a servant is caught helping themself, their employers tend to sermonise about honour, ethics, and such. Only it never seems to cross their minds that the equation works both ways.
It should be a basic principle of every employer to see to it that people are paid decent salaries. That, or close up shop, heritage or no heritage
Admittedly, Camilleri was neither starving nor living in a cardboard shack. Let’s just say his is a borderline case. Still, I would hold it up as an example of good practice. I’m saying that underpaid and exploited workers ought seriously to consider stealing from their employers. It’s about giving oneself a pay rise, by means fair or foul.
This is not about redistribution, which I consider a dangerous and counter-productive notion. I don’t care if 99 per cent of the wealth of the world is held by one per cent of its population. What does concern me is that a good chunk of the rest of that population lead miserable lives. The two things are historically, but not necessarily logically, and certainly not inevitably, related.
When it turns out they are, I would argue that the miserable among those 99 per cent are perfectly entitled to help themselves at the expense of those who exploit them.
Take me as an example. I’m aware there are people out there who make in a minute what I will earn in my entire lifetime. Still, I hold a job that makes it possible for me to live decently. At least in my case, the University is a fair employer. I have never nicked anything from it, nor do I plan to do so. And if I did, my action would be unjustified.
The plight of systematically exploited workers is a different matter altogether. They are condemned to live their lives on a knife edge, even as all the rhetoric about precarious labour and making poverty history rubs salt into their wounds.
One might argue that their real hope is politics, that nothing tangible or long-lasting can be gained by breaking the law. I’m not so sure, one of the reasons being that systems of exploitation usually make it very difficult for the exploited to organise themselves. Union membership, for example, is often unthinkable.
The maddening thing is that the same people who get all mean with their employees are usually only too happy to award themselves hefty pay packets. Last Wednesday, a Maltese court heard how Leisure Clothing managing director Hal Bin had pocketed a €30,000-a-year performance bonus, even as the actual performers were paid €70 a month for six 14-hour days a week.
Under such conditions, the only reasonable option is to resort to guerrilla tactics. The BBC reported the other day that Chinese civil servants were being given a pay rise as part of a drive to combat corruption. That’s because, in China as elsewhere, low pay is one of the causes of corruption as workers look to supplement their incomes. So, there we go, guerrilla tactics do work.
‘Pay peanuts get monkeys’, the cliché goes. The trouble is that it is thought to apply only for the top ranks. It seems that the lower down the ladder one climbs, the higher the apes to be had for peanuts. It’s a very good bargain, and one would be exceptionally mean to begrudge them a few extra nuts on the side.
mafalzon@hotmail.com