The easy part of Air Malta’s umpteenth restructuring will soon be completed. A total of 470 employees will be offered a job in the public service with their future wage bill to be footed by taxpayers.

This downsizing solution may tone down the frustration of the employees soon to be transferred, who will have to make a new start in their careers. It will also place new responsibilities on the government to ensure that taxpayer money does not go towards paying for non-productive jobs in the public sector.

Air Malta’s executive chairman, David Curmi, when deciding on the cost-cutting needed, described himself as a doctor on an operating table using his expertise to stop the haemorrhage. He would also do well to remember that the skills needed to make Air Malta successful go beyond those required to make good surgical cuts. The national airline’s management needs to understand the travel market exceptionally well to define a strategy that would see the company compete with other lean European airlines with undoubted expertise and clout to win market share.

It is now up to Finance Minister Clyde Caruana to reaffirm his professional approach to solving political challenges by making sure he does not ask taxpayers to underwrite salaries in dead-end public sector jobs.

One way of doing this is to give serious consideration to the advice of the Malta Employers’ Association, the Malta Chamber of Commerce and the Malta Hotels and Restaurants Association, among others, to ensure that as many former Air Malta employees as possible are redeployed in the private sector.   

To achieve this objective, Caruana would need to overcome the resistance of some workers who would prefer to work with the government, in what is often perceived as a less stressful job with a lifelong guarantee. He would also have to resist the political culture, which sees such workers often resorting to their local MPs to ensure that they get the least stressful job available.

This cultural dependence on pervasive political patronage is corrosive. It mitigates against the reforms needed in the labour market. It is encouraging that the minister has confirmed to this newspaper that he is open to the Chamber’s idea of seconding workers to the private sector.

Incentives would need to be created to reward the former Air Malta employees taking up offers of productive jobs available in the private sector.

Also, a proper skills audit would need to be undertaken as soon as possible to match the skill set of every employee with job vacancies that may exist in private companies.

Retraining middle-aged employees, who would probably only have experience in one particular line of work, could prove challenging. Caruana’s previous experience as head of JobsPlus would serve him well to optimise the potential of the human resources that is going to be made available as a result of Air Malta’s restructuring.

The ultimate objective of the redeployment exercise must be to find productive jobs for as many redundant employees as possible. Employers in the different economic sectors, as well as ordinary taxpayers, will be wanting assurance that the former airline employees do not end up underemployed in some of the already bloated government departments and quasi-government bodies. 

The country’s fiscal challenges in the coming few years will be significant. Every decision taken today that impacts public expenditure needs to be taken with the long-term aim of reducing the burden on taxpayers. Political considerations must come second.

Caruana is the man to make sure that the decisions made on former Air Malta employees follow this principle, while respecting the dignity of every worker.