On November 30, 2016, former Parliamentary Secretary for the Elderly Justyn Caruana announced with great pomp and ceremony at a media conference that Prime Minister Joseph Muscat had appointed the first Commissioner for Older Persons in Malta, in accordance with legislation passed by Parliament the previous month.
The government had informed the European Union about its intention to appoint the commissioner a long time before it actually did. In fact, merit was already given to Malta for its initiative in a report on the Active Ageing Index that was published by the EU more than six months before.
Caruana said that a big step forward had been made by the said legislation. Rightly so, because despite being recognised as a minority group by the National Commission for the Promotion of Equality, up to that point older persons did not have a commissioner to safeguard their rights and interests.
The appointment of the commissioner had put older persons on a par with other disadvantaged groups in the country including children, people with disability and refugees, which all had their own respective commissioner for a number of years.
The Commissioner for Older Persons is autonomous from arbitrary authority and empowered by law to promote and safeguard the interests of older persons, and investigate any alleged breaches or potential infringements of the human rights of the older persons.
Helen Mallia, who was introduced as the new commissioner during the media conference, is a senior citizen with long years of active trade unionism behind her. In her introductory speech she emphasised the importance of a continued contribution of older people towards society and said that her first priority would to see that all elderly persons who wished to continue working but were not allowed would have the right to do so until their health permits.
Mallia hit the nail right on the head. Indeed, active participation in the labour market and society together are considered as the elements for successful ageing, at both individual and countrywide levels.
However, unfortunately, that was the last time Mallia was on the news, unlike her two counterparts at the Family Ministry Pauline Miceli, the Commissioner for Children, and Oliver Scicluna, the Commissioner for the Rights of Persons with Disability, who are regularly in the news.
Mallia’s lack of attendance one time after another to official ceremonial occasions related to elderly persons has also been very conspicuous. She did not even attend consecutive Active Ageing Award ceremonies organised by the Parliamentary Secretariat for Persons with Disability and Active Ageing, and nobody bothered to explain why.
Apart from that, on the ministry’s website there has been no name listed as holder of the position of Commissioner for Older People as in the case of the other two positions of commissioners.
The natural question that arises here is: what has happened to the Commissioner for Older People Helen Mallia? It would have been sheer arrogance on the part of the government to remove her from office or accept her resignation without at least informing the public, particularly when considering all the pomposity with which she was appointed. In the event that she was replaced by someone else, one would have at least expected a formal official statement to that effect.
Many thoughts spring to mind about what could have been the reason for Mallia’s disappearance without a word from the government. Mallia’s enthusiasm to devote her time, energy and attention to the pursuit of the right of older people to have access to work without bias is not expected to have gone well with the Prime Minister, who is very sceptical about granting such right.
Muscat insists that for elderly people to remain working there has first to be an innovation which drives economic growth so that youth unemployment does not increase. Yet, despite Malta’s economic growth becoming one of the strongest in Europe with gross domestic product growth rate reaching an all-time high, and despite the record unemployment figures that have been reached, the State has continued to enforce a specific arbitrary chronological age that obliges an individual by law to leave work upon attaining retirement age, which at present is 63 years, and which can be extended by two years at the most only if the employer accepts.
Three consecutive Pensions Working / Strategy Groups that were appointed to study pensions by successive Maltese governments over a nine-year period between June 2004 and June 2013 have voiced the same opinion – that Mandatory Retirement Age should be abolished. But their cry remains ignored while mandatory retirement still forms an integral part of Maltese law. Mandatory retirement derived from chronological age amounts to unjust discrimination since it is imposed on the individual at an arbitrary age without a tangible bodily assessment. It negatively affects both employees who desire to continue working and society as a whole. It violates the self-dignity of these individuals, decreases their socioeconomic status, and has a deleterious effect on their psychological and physical health.
Concurrently, the labour market is deprived of the knowledge, skills, and experience of these employees who may be difficult to replace, while an increased burden is placed on the social security and pension system.
The current unjustified age discrimination in employment should be removed by eliminating the prescribed age limit for employment
As it has been so aptly said by Anthony Mule Stagno, president of the National Council for the Elderly of Malta, in an interview that appeared recently in this newspaper: “Although still healthy and able, some elderly people nowadays tend to feel useless and unworthy, particularly when they are forced to retire.”
Through the ‘National Strategic Policy for Active Ageing: Malta 2014-2020’ document, that has been noticed to suffer from lacunae and pitfalls by the European Union, the government has pledged a novel approach to supporting and empowering older individuals to remain in the labour market.
However, in reality so far this pledge has been nothing but empty rhetoric. Mandatory retirement has remained in force, while there has been a retention of the pensionable earnings cap.
Malta ranks poorly in global rankings with regard to the number of elderly people who work. Persons aged 65 to 74 who were economically active in 2017 amounted to just 5.8 per cent.
According to the Labour Force Survey estimates released by the National Statistics Office for the third quarter of 2018, persons aged 65 years and over constitute a mere 1.7 per cent of the total labour workforce.
These persons include a number of cronies of the political party in government, who have been handpicked for so-called positions of trust in the government service.
In the last Global AgeWatch study that covered 2015, which was derived from how well the ageing population is faring in the domains of income security, health status, capability and enabling environment, Malta has ranked last among 24 countries in Western Europe, North America and Australasia.
Malta also ranked 86th among the 96 participating nations in the employment and educational attainment of older workers.
The current unjustified age discrimination in employment should be removed by eliminating the prescribed age limit for employment in terms of the Social Security Act.
The government should also ensure comparable living standards between different generations. The money generated from the economic growth that the country is experiencing should not only be showered on powerful property entrepreneurs and Labour’s political clique, but some of it should also find its way in the pockets of low-income families and pensioners.
Many pensioners are facing significant financial hardship and a substantial number of them are unable to maintain a decent standard of living on their first-pillar pay-as-you-go funded pension, with the situation being made worse by the exorbitant increases in the cost of living.
In 2017 Malta ranked as the sixth country with the highest number of pensioners at risk of poverty from among the 28 EU member states. The estimated number of pensioners currently at risk of poverty is 22,000.
By denying the elderly of the rights enjoyed by younger persons, the government is simply encouraging cultural ageism and relegating older persons to second-class citizens.
In the meantime, the Maltese public has a right to know why the Commissioner for Older People has literally vanished in thin air following her appointment.
Denis Tanti is a former assistant director (industrial and employment relations) in the Ministry for Health.
This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece