The Nationalist Party has slammed the government’s restructuring plan for Air Malta, saying it has already failed.

PN MPs Ivan Castillo and Ivan Bartolo said the government had failed to successfully implement the plan it announced in January, and its failure was piling misery onto its workers, who still do not know where they would be moved to, once their employment with the airline comes to an end on August 12.

The plan had included a reduction of the workforce and an application to the European Commission to authorise state aid to the airline. 

With just a few days left before the expiry of the deadline for the transfer of workers to the public sector, the workers are still in the dark about their future and only a small percentage have been moved, the MPs said at a press conference on Monday.

“Workers are living in uncertainty. This is causing work-related stress. These workers were told they had a guaranteed job and were told not to worry. They were also told they were going to get new collective agreements but none of these were concluded,” Castillo said.

When Finance Minister Clyde Caruana announced in January that the government was halving the workforce in a bid to save the national airline, he made it clear no employees would become redundant.

They would be recruited by government entities enjoying the same wages and conditions they had at Air Malta, he pledged.

But, several months on and with just days before the deadline agreed with the GWU to give alternative jobs to 571 workers, only a small percentage of them have settled into new jobs.

“Finance Minister Clyde Caruana should come clean and say if the government’s plan to restructure the airline is still credible and achievable,” Bartolo, the PN’s spokesperson on Air Malta said.

He also questioned how the airline could lose a good chunk of its workers in the middle of August, at the peak of the tourism season, when the airline was busiest.

He admitted that the PN initially welcomed the plan when it was announced in January, as it was similar to what it had suggested in 2012. But not all risks and challenges had been addressed in the government’s plan.

“The government does not have a credible plan for Air Malta. The solution it said it had has not worked. Cost cutting does not come only by shedding jobs, especially after the pandemic and in the height of summer,” Bartolo said.