At a recent conference titled Workers On The Move, organised by the Malta-EU Steering and Action Committee, Parliamentary Secretary Chris Said painted a glowing picture of the merits ensuing from Maltese workers moving to other EU countries. These merits, he emphasised, included not only personal gains but also important contributions to Malta when they returned to work locally.

It all rather sounded as if this worker movement had been thought up and organised only yesterday. Maltese doctors, just to mention one group, have for decades (if not centuries) trained and worked in other countries, with some then returning to contribute their acquired experience to the local professional scene. What the parliamentary secretary failed to mention was that Maltese workers who had moved abroad and then returned to work here have had their foreign occupational/service pension subtracted from the Maltese retirement pension due to them on the basis of Maltese national insurance contributions paid.

To give a practical example, if a Maltese worker who has worked for 30 years overseas returns to work here for 10 years, he/she would get no Maltese state pension for those 10 years of Maltese NI contributions, because of his/her foreign occupational pension. This state of affairs in pension law has been going on since 1979 and is in obvious conflict with the principle of free movement of labour within the EU. This matter was put to one of our MEPs a few years ago but he did nothing about it. William Martin, Acting Head of the European Commission Representation in Malta, one of the speakers at the conference, was surprised to learn about this unbelievable injustice in Maltese pension law.

The forthcoming Maltese pension reforms must include full compensation of these workers who have been defrauded of the pension due to them on the basis of NI contributions paid.