For employers to ponder

As a former resident staff training manager for Barclays Bank, I feel I might have something to contribute to the debate on training and education.

The majority of employers in Malta fail to distinguish between training and education. Furthermore, we rarely hear about what operational training set-ups exist in their businesses.

There are a number of measures the government can introduce to improve the situation. These include linking certain tax benefits to staff training and Malta Enterprise making financial assistance conditional on ongoing internal staff training.

Another measure could be forbidding employers from sacking new employees simply because they expected them to be profit-earning for the company shortly after being employed.

A leader in the Times of Malta (December 24, 2022) is 100 per cent correct when it says employers are “poor” in their fashioning of training programmes for MCAST students. It is the same, and I know from experience, with university graduates.

And I am both sorry and angry to see that the Malta Employers’ Association comes across as a lobbyist with politicians for this or that benefit for its members, in the process completely ignoring this very important issue. This shows that far too many employers simply do not understand the difference between education and training.

JOHN CONSIGLIO – Birkirkara

Malcolm Muggeridge and Ukraine

Rescuers work on a residential building destroyed after a Russian missile strike in Dnipro, central Ukraine. Photo: AFP

Malcolm Muggeridge was received into the Catholic Church in 1982 through his encounters with St Mother Theresa of Calcutta and her prayers and encouragement.

Muggeridge (1903-1990) was a devout Anglican for most of his lifetime. He became famous as a post-World War II editor and television personality. His work brought him to India in 1969 to make a documentary about a Catholic nun who had founded a religious order dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor.

Through his landmark documentary Something beautiful for God he got to know Mother Theresa and her work for the poor and abandoned left a lasting impression on him. At the time, he publicly professed his Christian roots but was sceptical of the Catholic Church because of some negative aspects which kept him from fulfilling a strong desire to spend the rest of his years in the Catholic faith.

He overcame these reservations when he recognised in Mother Theresa a sign of the love of God that alone could give meaning to the love that transforms even suffering and death.

Another interesting aspect of Muggeridge’s life is his connection with Ukraine. As a journalist and Moscow correspondent for a British newspaper in 1932, he saw at first-hand the reality of Josef Stalin’s brutal reign of terror. He is on record as having said that, when he travelled to Ukraine (then one of the republics forming part of the USSR) he saw the horror and devastation of a politically engineered famine that killed millions of Ukrainians.

He was impressed when, on entering a crowded Ukrainian church in Kyiv on a Sunday, he witnessed so many hungry and desperate worshippers singing the liturgy and begging for the mercy of God who had suffered on the Cross. In the church, Muggeridge began to realise the suffering made worse by communism and this, he said, brought him nearer to Christ.

It would surely break his heart, were Muggeridge to be still around to view on TV, as we ourselves have been seeing for nearly one year, the horrors and suffering of the Ukrainian people through the all-out Russian aggression, engineered by Vladimir Putin, aimed at innocent civilians and the devastation of non-military buildings and utilities that are causing incredible suffering to the brave Ukrainian people. 

ANTHONY R. CURMI – St Julian’s