Updated - Adds Prime Minister's reaction

Labour leader Joseph Muscat said today that the Labour Party was backing the EU proposals to extend maternity leave to 20 weeks and introduce a two-week paternity leave.

Speaking at a political conference in Rabat this morning, Dr Muscat said that Labour had introduced maternity leave well before many other European countries and it was renewing its tradition by reaffirming the need for the country to have a system which protected and gave more rights to mothers, as well as fathers.

The government, he noted, was indicating that it was against the increase, claiming costs and a loss of competitiveness. Yet it never produced any studies to back its position.

The fact that this measure would apply to all EU countries removed concerns about loss of competitiveness, Dr Muscat said.

Furthermore, Labour MEP Edward Scicluna had produced a study showing that the cost of this measure would be €5 million, and not €12 million as employers had claimed.

He had proposed a partnership between the government and employers to ease the additional burden on the latter.

However, Dr Muscat said, even if the cost of the leave extension was to be absorbed by the government, it would actually be investment since this measure would encourage more women to go out to work. That would mean they would pay more tax and also ease problems such as that of sustainable pensions. Therefore, there would be no need to raise the retirement age.

He could not understand how the government was not understanding this argument, Dr Muscat said.

Furthermore, he said, the government had its priorities wrong. It was complaining of the costs of extending the maternity leave, but then was spending €100 million on a new Parliament House - costs which would be enough to fund the maternity leave extension for 20 years.

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Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi, speaking about the same subject at another political conference, said that maternity leave had to be seen in the context of other incentives, such as the possibility which Maltese mothers had to take a year off from work and then return to their jobs at the same grade.

Malta, he said, gave 14 weeks of fully paid maternity leave. Some other countries gave more maternity leave, but it was not fully paid.

The government was in favour of any measures which improved the work-family balance but it was important that any mechanisms which were agreed were applied in a uniform manner throughout the EU.

Comparisons, he stressed, had to be made like-with-like.