Feb 24 - Government Says The GSD’s Demand For Employers’ Names Is “Political Hypocrisy”
The Government says that the reaction of the GSD and Mr Bossino to the information that is being provided on employment is a reflection of their “political hypocrisy” and “double standards.”
The Government statement continues:
Having previously attacked the statistics on the number of persons taking trainees when the programme started in 2012, now that there are 300 the statistics no longer matter. What matters is that the 300 employers should have their names published.
The Government will not publish the names of those taking trainees because it considers that these responsible employers should be under no obligations to have their names published any more than the employers who do not take trainees. Indeed, those employers that are being public spirited in supporting the efforts to increase Gibraltarian employment are in the main long-established local businesses to whom the Government is grateful for their involvement and support. If anything, it is the employers who have not cooperated to date who should have their names published.
If it is so important to publish the names of those with trainees, why is it that the GSD in their 15 years in office failed to publish the names of all those that who were been provided with so called VTS trainees as cheap labour with the Government paying £300 to £400 a month and the employer having no commitment to provide training leading to qualifications or to provide employment at the end of the period? Many of those employers never provided employment, now we have 300 who do and they are accused of providing dead end jobs. There were numerous complaints under the GSD that there were employers who took a never-ending stream of trainees in order to keep their businesses going.
Of course, as in everything else, their failure to publish names was perfectly in order when they did it but the fact that the names of employers are not published now is lack of transparency. In other words the GSD in opposition subscribed to the policy of “do as I say and not as I did”.
As regards the companies that supply labour to the Government, these are now required to open vacancies with the employment service and take on employees from the local unemployed the same as everybody else. Under the GSD it was often the case that Agencies supplying labour to Government departments were using frontier workers at the expense of local workers.
It is clear that the reduction in unemployment and the record number of Gibraltarians now with jobs in the private sector is of no interest to Mr Bossino and the rest of the GSD, notwithstanding their protestations a year ago about how happy they would be to see such results. Their sole interest continues to be to find fault and to seek to undermine the Government’s efforts in providing training and employment to ever increasing number of Gibraltarians. The Government is confident that their effort to undermine the programme is doomed to failure. In the fiction world of the GSD, the fact that there are 600 Gibraltarians in full time employment in the private sector is a sham but the never-ending trainees without employment in their schemes of 15 years were real quality jobs. The Government is not creating artificial jobs, the Government is training people to fill the jobs that previously had been filled by bringing in labour from outside whilst our people were without work. In fact, despite his press release, at question time in Parliament, Mr Bossino accepted that the jobs following training were real jobs in the private sector and not a sham.
