Occupational status and social change

Abstract

The predominant concern of post-war governments in Malta was with various ways in which the local economy could be developed to maintain employment to compensate for substantial reductions in the scale and forms of employment at the Naval Dockyard and other services for the British military forces. At Independence in 1964, the British Government had agreed to maintain a reduced military presence and a privatised commercial dockyard with a development grant for ten years. After winning the 1971 election, Prime Minister Dom Mintoff got this extended to March 1979 with a substantially increased capital grant concluding with the final closure of the British base. During this period, a series of six development plans were proposed and implemented (Baldacchino, 1998). Textile, shoe and smaller scale manufacturing enterprises, mainly foreign firms aiming to export their products, were sited in new 'industrial estates: Tourism took off as did residential construction for retired expatriates and several suburban government housing units, including the construction from scratch of the towns of Santa Lucia and San Gwann. Although foreign competition was already threatening the shoe, leather, textile and garment factories, tourism was booming; and import substitution, the creation of several parastatal corporations, and national wage and price policies aimed to reassure a potentially worried population. Although their employment prospects were becoming increasingly precarious, the dockyard workers still represented an ideal type of often skilled manual worker and, in Malta, almost a labour aristocracy in that their shop stewards considered the continuity of their dockyard essential to the government in power (Zammit, 1984). This briefly depicts the labour market situation in 1979, a significant point in Malta's socio-historical development, and the year when a survey investigating perceptions of occupational status was carried out across four localities in Malta. This chapter first discusses the main occupational findings of the unpublished study. Such findings and their patterns are then used as a baseline for a discussion on how some occupations and their status appear to have changed over the past 40 years, in line with the socioeconomic and political changes that Malta has since experienced.