Gozo ministry has 306 ‘jobless’ workers from GWU-run scheme on its books

The Gozo Ministry has a total of 306 workers from the government’s Community Work Scheme on its books, workers who are supposedly being trained to find alternative work with private entities after being long-term unemployed.

Confirming how the scheme costing taxpayers some €20 million a year has been turned into another employment agency for his constituency, Gozo Minister Clint Camilleri has informed Opposition MP Chris Said that the hundreds of workers on the ministry’s books are being given assignments within the ministry’s 14 directorates.

Asked in parliament to list the training activities and courses the scheme’s beneficiaries have been given over the past year, the minister could not name a single one.

Placing the onus of training on the scheme’s administrators, a General Workers’ Union subsidiary foundation, Camilleri said it is “up to them” to decide what training to give, to whom and how.

Gozo has become the Community Work Scheme’s largest beneficiary, with almost half of the programme’s 1,200 participants from Gozo.

In addition to the hundreds stationed at the ministry, hundreds more are shared between Gozitan local councils and NGOs.

The Community Work Scheme was initially intended to serve as a job training scheme for the long-term unemployed to equip them with the skills required for employment in the private sector.

Instead, hundreds upon hundreds of people have been placed in the scheme, and many were given little or next to nothing to do and with practically no surveillance.

This has allowed many of those on the scheme to spend less than a 40-hour week at work and still be free to attend to their private businesses or other work – usually undeclared.

The scheme is costing taxpayers some €20 million a year, and the government has assigned its management to the General Workers Union, which, through a foundation, earns a management fee for each employee placed on the scheme.

In the meantime, all those on the scheme had stopped registering as unemployed and are now considered, for statistical purposes, employed by the private sector even though their salaries are paid with public funds.

The Auditor General recently warned the Community Work Scheme could be a mere exercise in keeping national unemployment figures low, confirming a long-held suspicion that the scheme for which the public is paying millions every year has had few tangible results, except for the Labour Party.

The scheme, the National Audit Office said, “is being rendered as an end in itself rather than a stepping stone towards gainful and sustainable employment” that is keeping unemployment figures artificially low by having people seeking work shifted onto the scheme.