Severance packages being offered to Air Malta employees could cost taxpayers €50 million, the Malta Employers Association said on Friday, one day after airline workers voted in favour of the deals.
The MEA described the severance packages as “the most obscene in Malta’s industrial relations history” and noted that the figures being mentioned could cost the country €50 million if all 350 Air Malta workers represented by the General Workers' Union opted for the deal.
It accused the government of squandering taxpayers’ money to resolve a mess of its own making.
“Companies and employees cannot take the government’s appeal for tax compliance seriously when it is distributing millions of their taxes to a privileged few, with such handouts amounting to more than an average worker saves in his or her lifetime," the MEA said.
Air Malta is currently being restructured to dramatically reduce its headcount and overheads.
The government initially said that around half of the airline's workers would be transferred to other government entities at equal pay and conditions. But workers' high salaries has made it hard to shift them, and on Thursday it emerged that workers would now also be given the option of taking a golden handshake deal to walk away from their job.
Severance deals range from €40,000 to €300,000, based on years of service.
“This severance deal is unprecedented and establishes that some animals are indeed more equal than others in Malta. It is nothing more than daylight robbery,” the MEA said.
The employers' lobby said the offers were especially egregious given that the government had made no effort to relocate employees to the private sector, "which currently faces a shortage of labour in many industries, leading many companies to engage foreign employees."
The association said that the manner in which the airline has handled its human resources over the years has been “a tragedy of errors”.
Air Malta has been overmanned for decades, it said, with many employees being just political cronies the airline could easily have done without.
“Air Malta could never steer itself towards profitability when it was shackled by unsustainable overheads, employing hundreds of persons for every airplane in its fleet.
“Moreover, a side letter which guaranteed employees a permanent job with the same take-home pay was kept secret, and only came to light when matters reached boiling point,” the MEA noted.
“There are thousands of better ways to use such funds than wasting them on golden handshakes. This agreement is morally flawed, and only intended to appease an advantaged class of workers, many of whom should never have been employed at Air Malta in the first place,” the MEA insisted.