The need to balance economic development and provide a skilled workforce that could continue to support economic growth was highlighted by Employment Minister Evarist Bartolo this morning.

Speaking in Parliament, he said Maltese businesses were feeling the lack of available skilled workers in spite of a new matchmaking system implemented with Jobsplus.

Because of this, economic development was being supported by an influx of foreign workers, who were themselves contributing to the upskilling of the local workforce.

Some were being employed illegally, with no regard to their rights and in precarious and often unsafe conditions.

More needed to be done to resolve this as regular inspections found 3,500 such illegal workers. On the other hand, 1,105 had been struck off the unemployment register for abusing benefits, the minister said.

Shadow Minister Therese Comodini Cachia said that 24,000 Maltese workers had both full-time and part-time employment, and that this was often an indicator that their full-time job did not provide sufficient income to support a decent way of living.

She criticised Minister Bartolo for the JobsPlus scheme that had passed workers who were paid less and employed in worse conditions than their counterparts elsewhere to the General Workers’ Union.

She asked why 2,000 people had recently and abruptly stopped registering for work in Gozo, and why there were 7,000 youths who were neither in formal education nor officially employed.

Concluding, Dr Comodini Cachia drew the attention to the gender pay gap of 10.6 per cent, which, despite being lower than the EU average, was on the increase.

She criticised Parliament’s failure to do anything about the glass ceiling that prevented most women from achieving high-level positions, and called for a national strategy to address both issues.