Government, union, not involved in workers' assessment

Investments Minister Austin Gatt insisted in parliament yesterday that the government and the General Workers' Union were not involved in any way in the choice of the 900 workers who have been transferred from the shipyards and given the choice of early retirement or an alternative job in the public sector.

The selection was made by the management according to a selection process explained in detail to both sides while the talks on the reform of the shipyards were in hand, the minister said.

He was speaking during the debate on the Dockyard and Shipbuilding Yard (Restructuring) Act.

Labour MP Helena Dalli accused the government of down throdding the workers, saying it was humiliating that the 900 workers who were being transferred had to ask to see their management assessment when even children were given their assessments automatically when they completed their school projects. She said the GWU should have been involved in the assessment process. As it were, the process lacked transparency, to the extent that the MLP representative on the shipyards reform task force had, since 2001, been unsuccessfully asking for the assessment criteria. Mrs Dalli said the situation was such that qualified workers had been selected to leave the shipyards while persons who were medically unfit had been retained. It was no wonder that the selected workers were now complaining of injustices.

The minister at the opening of the debate, said the bill tackled the legal aspects of the shipyards agreement announced last week. It provided for Malta Drydocks and Malta Shipbuilding to be wound up, with their assets and liabilities transferred to the government. The assets needed for the shipyards would be leased back to Malta Shipyards, the new company which would manage the shipyards. Other assets, particularly the area around No1 Dock, could be used for other commercial purposes by the government.

Dr Gatt said 1,700 former workers of Malta Drydocks and Malta Shipbuilding would be transferred to Malta Shipyards and the rest were being offered early retirement or transfer to Industrial Projects and Services Ltd. The workers were being transferred under the conditions they enjoyed now.

This bill, Dr Gatt said, enabled Malta Shipyards to start its operations with a clean slate, without the burden of the Lm300 million in debt carried by the existing companies.

Mrs Dalli said the opposition agreed that action was needed to make the shipyards viable. Indeed, the Labour government had launched a reform process in 1997 but that was shelved for a whole three years by the present government, at the cost of millions of liri.

Now the government was doing something in a fit of panic, but such haste was leading to wrong decisions.

The government had a habit of quoting the Appledore report, commissioned by the Labour government. Yet the Appledore report, which the Labour government had not endorsed, was against the merging of Malta Drydocks and Malta Shipbuilding, which this government favoured.

After hitting out at the workers assessment process, Mrs Dalli said the government had failed to publish its business plan for the shipyards. Nor had it said what savings the current reform would bring about. Indeed, reform could not be successful just by reducing the workforce and introducing early retirement schemes.

The government needed to convincingly show that it was committed to the continued operation of the shipyards, such as by recruiting apprentices. An apprenticeship centre should be redeveloped into an enterprise of its own.

The Labour government had started a process of developing new areas of activity for shipyard workers, such as steel works. Why had this process been stopped to be replaced by early retirement schemes?

The opposition, Mrs Dalli said, wanted more accountability and transparency in the way the shipyards operated. It would appear that the government would be reporting to the EU about the situation, but what about the national parliament? And why not have a workers' representative on the board?

The new reality was that unless targets agreed with the EU were met, the EU could order a stop to all subsidies even before the transition period was up, and the shipyards would have to close. How could the opposition be in favour of such a situation?

Concluding, Mrs Dalli said everyone should be held accountable for their actions at the shipyards, and the workers should not be made to suffer for the mistakes of their seniors.

Labour MP Leo Brincat said that rather than focusing on early retirement and layoffs, the government should focus on ensuring that Malta's shipyards had a well-equipped and aggressive marketing team. The shipyards' activities needed to be diversified to include more ship conversions and offshore vessel serving, as well as other activities such as the production of solar panels, bus building and steel projects.

Mr Brincat said the process for the selection of the workers transferred from the shipyards was vitiated and appeared to include an element of political cleansing, as shown by the fact that GWU activists were being pushed out of the shipyards.

Dr Gonzi might have unwittingly misled the House last week when he said the assessments would have been updated from 2001, when they were started. Yet, clearly, workers were being transferred from the shipyards on the strength of faulty assessment which should be revised irrespectively of the legal steps taken by the GWU.

How many workers older than 56 years had been kept on, when very good workers in their 30s had been turned away? Why had shipyard workers on secondment to government ministries and departments been kept on the shipyards' books?

What projections existed for Industrial Projects and Services Ltd, which would take on the transferred workers?

He observed that according to the outcome of the negotiations with the EU, all state aid to the shipyards should be phased out by 2008. Labour's concern was that unless there was a sharp upturn in the viability of the shipyards, they would have to close, and precious little time was being allowed for this target to be achieved. He hoped time would prove Labour wrong, but the government had repeatedly come up with reform plans for the shipyards and all had failed. Who would assume ownership and responsibility for the latest attempt? This was a moment of truth. Should this plan fail, it would be an economic and human tragedy.

Mr Brincat referred to the joint venture Malta Drydocks has with Palmer Johnson, and asked if the government had received any status reports about this strategic partner in yacht refitting.

What guarantees existed that the ongoing measures would get the shipyards where they should? Did the business plan tally with the restructuring plan?

Success at the shipyards could only come from cost cutting and productivity enhancement.

The management at the drydocks was one of the greatest deficiencies in the enterprise, and the workforce could certainly not be held to blame for this. Productivity stood at 35 per cent, and the business plan foresaw a rise to 65 per cent.

Mr Brincat said it was difficult to understand the government's rationale in going even further than the requirements of the EU in some areas. One would have expected that Malta Drydocks would have been given the opportunity to share in the commercialisation of the Dock No. 1 area. He augured that this capital project would not end up as exploitation of real estate, as had already happened with other projects.