(Adds PL's reply)
The Nationalist Party welcomed the increase in jobs by 3.6 per cent last year but expressed concern that while those in the civil service had increased by nearly five per cent, those in the private sector increased by just over three per cent.
In a statement this evening, shadow ministers Mario de Marco and Therese Comodini Cachia said the Opposition was also concerned with the rate of people whose main job was part time. This left an impact on the quality of life of Maltese and Gozitan families.
Following long years of growth in the number of jobs in the private sector, the country had returned to a situation where one of every three people worked in the civil service. This was the reality after just two years of a Labour government.
This reality had a strong impact on the sustainability of the country’s finances and shed a light on the situation of the private sector in Malta.
On a number of years, the expense on wages in the civil service would have increased by €127 million, they said.
These figures, the shadow ministers said, continued to create doubts about the sustainability of the government’s economic strategy as another drop was registered in industrial production, which had shrunk in nine months out of the past 12.
This was why the PN would continue to insist on economic initiatives which encouraged the private sector to invest in the economy for better jobs which would strengthen the sustainability of the country’s financial situation, they said.
PL's REPLY
In a reply, the Labour Party said official statistics for December 2012, when there was a Nationalist government, showed that out of 41,010 out of 152,582 new jobs were in the civil service. This meant that 27 per cent of all jobs in the country were in the civil service.
Last December, 44,399 out of 165,443 (27 per cent) full time jobs were in the civil service. This showed that the proportion of people employed in the civil service was closer to a fourth than a third, as the PN shadow ministers were claiming.
It also meant that if the PN felt this proportion to be too high, it should explain why it had left behind the same proportion.
The shadow ministers should explain why 600 new jobs in the civil service were approved during the last electoral campaign, an increase of six people a day, one of the highest increases in the country’s recent history.
The Labour Party said it was also not true that one of every five people had a part-time job as a primary job.
It said that in December 2014, there were 165,443 people working full time and 34,057 (17.1 per cent) who had just a part time job. This, the PL said, was one of every six people. The percentage in December 2012, the PL said, was 17.2, marginally higher than at present.