The rent won’t pay itself

Not knowing much about stuff hasn’t stopped me from shooting my mouth off before, but this I know something about.  Redundancy, for instance. Collective redundancy. Consultation obligations. Those tiresome little impediments to an employer deciding that the future has arrived and the staff can collect their belongings on the way out.

Gambling industry workers are saying artificial intelligence (AI) is displacing them, alongside allegations of pressure to sign resignations and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), those much-loved instruments of gaggery.

GamingMalta, owing its existence to the need to promote the industry, begs to differ on the scale of the problem and speaks of talent being “redeployed”.  Well, it would, wouldn’t it?

I am not particularly interested in hearing the sales department assure us that the product is lovely. I want to hear from the Department of Industrial and Employment Relations (DIER) and Jobsplus.

What are they finding? Are they looking?

They are not exactly over-resourced, so this is not me getting at them; but what do their records show, what have they investigated, and what happens to the people whose jobs disappear?

Some time ago, I flew something of a fanciful kite in The Malta Business Weekly about AI and redundancy under Maltese employment law. The question was whether replacing the human while retaining the work tests the boundaries of the redundancy concept.  I argued that technological progress does not, in and of itself, make resulting redundancies legally compliant.

The law does not provide a clear answer, mainly because it fails, as always, to keep up with reality.  Mouthing the magic letters “AI” does not cause employment law to disappear, either.

Where the statutory thresholds for collective redundancy are reached, consultation with employees’ representatives and notification to DIER are obligations.

Consultation must address avoiding dismissals, reducing their number and mitigating their consequences. It must offer an opportunity to influence what happens. Announcing the outcome and inviting everyone to admire management’s forward thinking, and sign up for as small a payout as management thinks it can get away with, does not do the job.

DIER should be able to tell us how many relevant notifications it has received, what compliance checks it has undertaken, and whether complaints point to dismissals being presented as something else.

Convenient resignations and allegations of pressure deserve more attention than a soothing paragraph about adaptation. There is a rather substantial difference between choosing to leave and being invited to choose the exit your employer has already selected for you.  Did you jump, or were you pushed?

Jobsplus has a different set of questions to answer. What do termination records show? Are affected workers moving into comparable jobs in Malta? How long does that take? At what pay?

The first concern must be the workers. Many are young people who have built commitments around a salary: rent, loans, relationships, perhaps children. They cannot pay this month’s bills with a prediction that technological progress will eventually create wonderful opportunities for somebody.

This is also a question about the country we have arranged around those salaries.

Many have become exceedingly fond of an economic model in which somebody else’s employment provides our rental income. Bring in the workers, house them at ambitious prices, collect the money and congratulate ourselves on our entrepreneurial genius.

This dependence extends from residential landlords to owners of office premises and the businesses that serve the people who work there. At risk of stating the bleedin’ obvious, a worker who leaves Malta does not keep paying rent out of gratitude for having experienced our infrastructure.

Those who have been leeching off the sector through ever more demanding rents might consider the possibility that the supply of well-paid tenants is not an immutable law of nature. The worker is replaceable, apparently. The rental standing order, less conveniently, is cancellable.

If this goes south, we are in trouble. And by “we” I include the people who have mistaken the monthly collection of somebody else’s wages for a national development strategy.

Some might actually have to do some work. GamingMalta can carry on promoting gaming all it likes, but the DIER and Jobsplus should tell us what is happening to the people who work in it.

The rent collectors can read the same report.