Not dawn at the shipyards

Confusion grows, rather than diminishes, regarding the manner in which the reconstruction of the shipyards has been planned and is being implemented. Where the human factor is concerned preciseness cannot be expected. And, first and foremost, it is the workers whose livelihood depends on the future of the sector that are the social concern. The fiscal and economic side of it - massive debts to be written off in respect of past and continuing losses, the burden to be borne by the taxpayer for them and for payment for non-productive alternative deployment, competitiveness - fall in another category.

Taxpayers have a right to question the deal they are presented with in regard to an over-manned public sector, of which the shipyards and what follows them is only one example. They may argue that there are more urgent social priorities. Above all, private sector workers who lost or face the growing prospect of losing their job because of superior competition, themselves also taxpayers, do notice the fact they have no similar safety net.

Odious comparisons at this stage will do nothing to contribute towards a new dawn of hope at the restructured shipyard. That is required if the entity is to look to the future with courage, yielding some ease of mind to those to be employed in it and, indirectly, to those who complain about the cost to the taxpayer of continuing losses.

Ensuring that quotations are based on direct labour that will be deployed productively, without carrying along numbers excess to the requirements of the proposed job, can be a starting point. Pay rates, work practices and management, coupled with the technology applied will yield estimates of unit cost that will then have to be compared to those of competitors. That, adjusted for direct or hidden subsidies, is what determines where orders are placed.

Trying to move forward on the back of a project born of desperation and nurtured with disillusion and bewilderment, perhaps worse, is a bad start. There is bound to be an element of unavoidable subjectivity in selecting one worker and not the other for core productive activities. To expect the courts to deal with that, even if the unions or individuals go beyond remonstrative judicial protest to active pursuit of legal redress, is to search for the impossible, or for lame relief from immediate pressure. To anticipate that further letters to the workers, this time to give belated explanations of the selection criteria, will help push the project forward is also no more than a futile attempt at a patching-up exercise.

On the ground there is awareness of selection boobs that may not necessarily be due to deliberate discrimination but which cannot be explained from the standpoint of the competitive interest of the proposed shipyard company.

It might help to introduce some objectivity by giving details of what the new company will target and, working back, what it will consist of. Explaining that publicly may be an odd way to go about creating what should at long last be a commercial enterprise. But what is happening is nothing if not odd.

The government has confirmed the project as some sort of new state initiative, rather than infusing it with private sector inputs. Its spinners are more concerned with stressing that Karmenu Mifsud Bonnici identified 70 per cent of those selected to be in the new shipyard when he was tackling a similar task for the 1996-98 Labour government in the context of the Appledore Report. The fact that time, job requirements and human resources availability have not stood still these past five years is ignored.

The project business plan, surely, was drawn up on structured assumptions and forecasts of work that can be reasonably expected to be won over three to five years, what facilities and how many workers, and in which trades, will be required to execute it. Revealing that will not give any advantage to competitors. It would, rather, set a basis for the former and projected shipyard workers, as well as for taxpayers and the general public, to begin to be in a better position to understand and assess what is going on.

As it is, nobody seems to be satisfied and many are disturbed and unhappy. A twist in the tale is that a considerable number of those identified as the 1,700 workforce for the new shipyard company want to take early retirement, indicating that there are seeds of discontent where there should be the bulbs required to flower as early as possible.

It is clear that the shipyard saga is far from over. It is even clearer that the plot, if ever there was really one, is going astray.