The ones I know personally took the decision that the one earning the better salary should work full time outside the house and the one earning less should stay at home, at least till the kids grew up to take care of kids, house and manage the family and business accounts at home. In these cases the man became the househusband whilst the wife became the main bread winner. I am referring to couples, both of whom are professional people or with high-flying careers and a good standard of living. And it isn’t just young couples doing this. When I was very young I remember a family friend, a very busy pharmacist who worked full time whilst her husband, who in those days was a high-ranking civil servant, gave up his job in order to stay at home and bring up their own son and take care of the house and everything to do with it. These arrangements work fine too so long as there is plenty of give and take between the couple concerned and one is ready to sacrifice a bit here and there so long as it is for the good of the whole family.These arrangements aren’t rare at all and the man is not necessarily a skiver or a bum either.

[Daphne – I don’t know what world you live in, Sybil, but among the hundreds of families I know or who are known to me, there is just one where the wife works while the husband is the housewife. And I use that word advisedly, because he has turned into the worst example of the kind, concerned with trivial talk about the neighbours and the price of cabbages, fiddling and fussing, a situation which clearly causes his wife considerable distress, added to the pressure she has of paying all the bills. And the reason he is at home while she works, in the first place, is not because she had a higher salary, but because three months after they married, and before they had children, he developed a psychosomatic problem that he claims left him unable to sit for long hours at his desk. He said he would work at home – he does the kind of work that makes this possible – but within another few months, he gave that up too. When their first child was born, he hadn’t worked for a couple of years.]

I always thought that the principal aim of the GRTU should be to boost competition, trade, and eliminate unnecessary regulation which stifle trade and business in general. However, my observations lead me to believe that the GRTU is warped in a socialist mindset. They try to block anything that has any trait of competition in it (no big supermarkets, no liberalisation of pharmacies, no this, no that). They are completely oblivious to the concept of free movement of goods and services within the EU. Sometimes I suspect that if given the chance, they would prohibit any e-business activities, so that they keep on protecting all the ‘dying breeds’ (travel agents, insurance agents, etc who have already disappeared in the USA). The concept of a free market, with no barriers to new entrants, simply does not exist.

Some people have to have EVERYTHING explained to them, to the last punto e virgola; common sense is not so common after all!

But you’ see plenty in places like the supermarket , in a queue at the post office or bank or in the waiting room at a doctor’s or dentist’s surgery or hanging out the washing on some rooftops.

[Daphne – I think you’ll find they’re unemployed shirkers or men who work shifts, as so many do in Malta.]

For the first time ever, I can say this about the persons(s) who invented these tariffs…Quem deus vult perdere, prius dementat. It’s crazy. If you had to see what we have to now pay, there is only one way forward. Not pay the increase. The governmnet should also do its bit. Why is there no policy of hire and fire, and why did we not do away with the PSC? Government employee productivity is still low compared to private industry.

Allow me to include a quote from our latest press release, for the benefit of the readers of this esteemed blog.
Il-GRTU tibqa ssostni bl-iktar mod iebes li l-istrategija tal-Gvern li ggieghel 41,324 klient zghir u medju, jissusidjaw 531 klient kbir li juzaw iktar minn 200,000 Unit hi strategija mhux biss ingusta imma bi ksur sfaccat tal-Electricity Directive tal-Unjoni Ewropeja li ma tippermettix dan it-tip ta’ cross-subsidazion. Dan ma jfissirx li l-GRTU ma tridx li l-industrija l-kbira tkun meghjuna pero l-GRTU tghid car li din l-ghajnuna ma ghandiex tkun a skapitu tan-negozji zghar u medji. Din kienet mill-ewwel oggezjoni kbira tal-GRTU u hu nsult lis-sidien tan-negozji zghar u medji kollha li l-Gvern qed jibbaza t-tariffi godda fuq dan il-kriterju hekk zbaljat.

Good day to you all!

[Daphne – You have described exactly what I meant about talking yourself into hard times. Nobody has lost their job. Unemployment has decreased. The number of people in full-time employment is actually higher than it was last year. I work in the very business that’s the first to feel any pinch, because it’s extremely sensitive, and this in a sector-specific way. For example, when the government dilly-dallied over the car tax promise made in the last election, we lost most of our car advertising. When the financial services crisis broke a few months ago, we lost a lot of advertising in that sector. As for the rest, it’s buoyant. And it’s not just the magazines I publish – look at all the others pouring out of the newspapers. They’re jam-packed with advertising. Advertising is the first thing that is cut in a REAL economic crisis, and it’s one of the best indicators of how things are really doing, as opposed to going by our fears and imagination. Before the last election, I met a former editor of the Sunday Times, who told me how worried he was because economically, things don’t seem to be going so well (they never are, in Malta, apparently). What? I said: just look at your old newspaper. It’s full of advertising. Unfortunately, Maltese merchants, traders and shop-keepers have a tendency to get locked in little boxes. They expect things to carry on as they were despite the changes in people’s behaviour and the competition for their products and services. Only yesterday, I was looking at the comments posted beneath an on-line report of my dear friend Pierre Fava’s remarks about a bad Christmas. They were all from consumers who didn’t agree with him, which at first seemed odd because many of them are the very same ones who are on-line all the time posting anti-government remarks and you would have thought they would have relished this opportunity. They said they’re not buying because prices are so much higher in Malta. They’re going to UK to take advantage of the weak pound; they’re buying over the internet. I disliked their anti-‘businessmen’ sentiment, but I could see that they were talking about real behavioural patterns. If you want to know what a real crisis is, go elsewhere, where people are losing their jobs in the hundreds of thousands, and where the currency is weak: the UK, the US, Canada, where I am now. On the smartest section of Toronto’s Bloor Street, the shops have huge sale signs up, with prices knocked down by 40% and 50%, and still nobody is buying. Prada, Chanel, and Hermes are just next to our hotel, and in the four days I’ve been here so far, I haven’t seen a single person go in other than the salespeople. There are no hordes of people raiding the racks in the less upmarket shops, as there would have been ordinarily, given that this is the equivalent of the January sales and before Christmas too. Add to that the weakness of the Canadian dollar. People are travelling more, Mario – just check out how many Maltese are popping off to London for a few days to take advantage of the pre-Christmas sales and the weak pound. The Maltese have money, and they’re using it to buy elsewhere, either physically by travelling or using the internet. Yes, I can see that some people have been scared by bad talk into scrimping their cents, but for heaven’s sake, don’t let your organisation contribute even further to it. As one of my best friends – a very canny merchant – told me when he saw the report of Vince Farrugia’s ‘worst Christmas ever’ statement in the newspaper some weeks ago: what does he hope to achieve by this? An increase in sales? Those who have any business sense at all know that even when things seem bad, they’ve got to talk them up, not down.]

[Daphne – I’m trying to keep up, but it’s a little difficult at the moment.]