Family-friendly measures need to be revised since they have now become outdated and are still looked down upon by some sectors of civil society, Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said yesterday.
Addressing a press conference yesterday on women in employment, Dr Muscat said that while the government embraces the concept of equality on a political level, the public services are inconsistent in the way they interpret and exercise family-friendly measures.
“While certain departments, agencies and companies employ them well, others view requests for family-friendly measures in a very negative way. This is due to the fact that the package of family-friendly measures was first introduced in the 1990s – and was a good package for the time. But we are still using the same basis nowadays. The family composition and the type of jobs have changed a lot since then. We will be collaborating with the head of the civil service to address this,” Dr Muscat said.
He said that measures such as free childcare were the first building blocks which would lead to pension reform. A sustainable pension system can be achieved through either increasing the age of retirement or increasing national insurance or through getting more people in the workforce, Dr Muscat said.
The government, he said, is looking at the third option. Women born between 1950 and 1956 who, for some reason, had not paid the necessary national insurance to safeguard their pension will be allowed to pay it back in a staggered manner.
“During the period these women were employed, some were either not educated enough about the importance of paying national insurance or there were abuses because they were in employment without a work book.”
The government urgently needs to rebalance the pensions system, the Prime Minister said, adding that pensioners are unable to cope on €500 a month.
“In the past, grandparents used to set something aside to give to their grandchildren. Now it’s the other way round,” Dr Muscat said.
Social Dialogue Minister Helena Dalli said apart from the social and economic benefits of free childcare, the concept of ‘educare’ is shown to improve children’s well-being, create a foundation for lifelong learning, reduce poverty and increase intergenerational social mobility.
Such initiatives are also coupled with the extension of Klabb 3-16 and the breakfast clubs, which care for some 700 children who must be dropped off at school early.
Between September 2012 and September 2014, Malta has registered a six per cent increase in the rate of working women.
Employment and Training Corporation chairman Clyde Caruana said that in 2014, 250 women made use of tapering unemployment benefits. In January and February of 2015, a further 200 women on benefits decided to take up a job while benefiting from the scheme.
Currently, 51 per cent of women are employed, he added. The target is that by 2020, 60 per cent of women will be engaged in employment.