In the past 50 years, science has made giant steps by mapping the entire human genome and eradicating smallpox. Infant mortality rates have fallen and deaths from heart diseases have also declined by roughly 70 per cent. The average Maltese has gained almost a decade of life. The internet was invented. Material wealth for most families multiplied.
Still, the problem of poverty has seen little real improvement.
Caritas’ latest report, titled The Minimum Essential Budget for a Decent Living 2024, is a thought-provoking analysis of how living costs in the last four years have affected vulnerable families, including pensioners, the working poor and single parents. The headline finding of this detailed report is that the cost of feeding a family of four shot up by over €3,500 in four years.
Defining the metrics of poverty remains challenging. The elements of the Caritas ‘basic basket’ is reasonable. As expected, food is the most significant expense for low-income families. Any fair assessment of poverty must confront the impressive march of material progress. The fact that living standards have risen across the board does not mean that poverty has fallen.
Until a couple of decades ago, only the rich could afford mobile phones. Today they are cheaper and most Maltese have one, including many on the breadline.
Arguing that people experiencing poverty are not quite so poor is, at best, misleading. Mobile phones do not grant you stable housing, affordable groceries or efficient medical care.
While the Caritas report did not delve into why poverty persists in our society, we must identify the root causes of this social blight to start tackling it more effectively.
It is too superficial to conclude that poverty in Malta, like many other Western democracies, persists because of the ascendency of market fundamentalism, or ‘neoliberalism’, when layers of the welfare state were dismantled, taxation reduced and regulations slashed.
The primary reason for the stalled progress on poverty reduction has to do with the fact that various administrations have not adequately confronted the unrelenting exploitation of the poor in the labour and housing markets.
For instance, the bargaining power of low and unskilled workers in the last decade has been undermined by liberal labour market policies that encouraged the mass importation of low-paid workers from third-world countries. Just because desperate people accept and even seek out exploitative conditions does not make these conditions any less exploitative.
For many, especially low-skilled workers, exploitation is simply the best bad option. Often, low-paid workers also face consumer exploitation in the housing market due to an economic model based on the mass importation of labour that boosts residential property demand.
Sadly, trade unions today have lost sight of their mission to help workers defend their rights against the might of corporate businesses. Today, almost all private sector employees are without a union. Trade unions prefer to protect the status quo by focusing on defending public sector employees’ rights. Moreover, the government seems to be more interested in listening to corporate lobbyists’ voices than the working poor’s weak pleas for protection.
The Caritas report makes very relevant recommendations to ease pressure on the poor, especially pensioners with limited income who cannot do much to improve their situation.
The government will argue that social security expenditure is increasing every year. While this is a fact, this expenditure cannot abolish poverty by itself. If we continue to ignore the role that exploitation in the labour and housing markets plays in trapping people in poverty, we end up designing policies that are weak at best and ineffective at worst.