Honoraria : What lies beneath?

Fausto Majistral is back with another Zolabyte. He gives us a no-nonsense analysis of the main issues that surround the whole ruckus about honoraria. It’s less about the politics and more about the constitutional issues.

Service as an MP in the Maltese House of Representatives is a part-time affair. “Part-time” is a misnomer, of course, because parliamentary work is not only attending sittings in plenary and involves all other sorts of things including constituents who could be quite demanding (to say the least) both in what they demand and the time at which they demand.

But we should not linger on this point: after all, nobody calls teachers “part timers” because the time they spend in the classroom is less than the usual annual average of 40 hours.

There were moves in the past, very discreet, to make parliament a “full time” affair. That would have meant, amongst other things, that apart from ministerial duties parliamentary service would have been to the exclusion of all other work (a condition which would have no justification for as long as being an MP was part-time). A significant advantage gained would have been that the risk of situations of conflict of interest would have been hugely reduced.

Needless to say, this was resisted by some MPs, particularly those who are also members of a profession. Their full time work is as big as the size of their clientele which is largely a matter of their choosing. In many cases, the service they offer their clientele can be delegated to professional partners or assistants. MPs whose full time job is as an employee, where the working hours are not of their choosing and where the duties cannot be delegated, do not have such luxury.

So parliamentary service remained part-time. Paid. Which you can combine with any other full time job. Equally paid. Except for one full time job: being minister.

Before anyone makes the point that being a minister you waive your moral right to be paid anything for basic MP work because your full time job is paid from the public purse, please note that you can combine a full time salary for a job in the public sector and the honorarium for being a part-time MP. Being a minister is one of the very few jobs, in the public as well as a private sector, which disqualifies you from the parliamentary honorarium.

I will not go here into the concurrent issue of whether MPs’ honoraria should have gone from 50% to 70% of the civil service’s salary scale 1. For the very simple reason that, I have no way to tell if 50% or 70% is what is deserved for the duties in question. Note however that one of Jean-Pierre Farrugia’s main gripes (which I think is representative of what the critics have so far said) was that it was bad timing in the prevailing financial situation.

Certainly. But please note that a pay increase that’s unrelated either to productivity or cost of living is hardly and alien concept in Maltese labour law. It’s the stuff annual increments based on a sector’s collective agreement are made of.

Neither do I need to go into the other main gripe, that these increases should not have been introduced by stealth. For the simple reason, that the critics are right on this one. Salaries and honoraria for ministers and parliamentarians should be the subject of law, as is already the case with the salaries of the President of Malta, the Attorney-General and the Auditor-General, or at least a parliamentary resolution.

But this should not detract us from the fact that the way payment is made for ministerial or parliamentary service disadvantages members of one category of employment over an other. The compromise struck between Farrugia and his Leader hardly addresses that question.

This is not a trivial discussion or one which is irrelevant to the health of a democracy. The early proponents of paid service argued their case on the grounds that no one should be barred from being an MP if elected simply because he has no other private means.

That was the argument in the UK in the beginning of the 20th century; it would have lost little force in Malta of the 21st. Apart from the Leader of the Opposition and MPs who have private means, note the the MPs who first and enthusiastically stated they’ll donate the increase to charity or some pet campaign were mostly members of the professions.

Given much credence to that quote by George Bernard Shaw that the professions are really conspiracies against the laity.

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Zolabytes is a rubrique on J’accuse – the name is a nod to the original J’accuser (Emile Zola) and a building block of the digital age (byte). Zolabytes is intended to be a collection of guest contributions in the spirit of discussion that has been promoted by J’accuse on the online Maltese political scene for 5 years.
Opinions expressed in zolabyte contributions are those of the author in question. Opinions appearing on zolabytes do not necessarily reflect the editorial line of J’accuse the blog.
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