Yes, Mr Bartolo, life goes on for you but not for the dead man
On timesofmalta.com this morning, in a story about the death on a Mellieha construction site of 27-year-old Maksims Artamonovs, who was the only source of financial support for his mother, sister and small niece, who remained in Latvia:
Etienne Bartolo, the general manager of B&B Holdings and Investments Ltd, which employed Mr Artamonovs, said the company was still coming to terms with what happened. Mr Artamonovs’ closest colleagues, particularly his co-nationals, were still in shock, he said.
“But life must go on, there’s nothing we can do now,” he said.
Actually, Mr Bartolo, there’s a great deal you can and should do. If you are not covered by insurance that will mean a lump-sum paid to Mr Artamonovs’ dependents, then you should take on that responsibility yourselves. You are morally obliged to do so.
If his dependents had the means and ability of suing you, you know that you would be legally obliged to pay them a lump sum covering loss of earnings. And when the man who dies is just 27, that lump sum is significant.
It would be callous to take advantage of the fact that two impoverished women in Latvia and a small child cannot very well file a suit against a company in Malta and spend years in court.
That sentence, so casually spoken, “Life must go on, there’s nothing we can do now” really flipped my switch.
If there are any words I would love to ban from the lexicon of Maltese tactlessness, it’s ‘life must go on’. Why in God’s name do people say that? Don’t they realise how dreadful it sounds, how entirely out of place it is, how very offensive – especially when life quite clearly is NOT going to go on for somebody who has died?
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“No one can fix what happened. But we offered them all the support we could. We also offered to pay all their expenses to be able to come and work in Malta and offered his sister a job if she wants, since she is unemployed,” Mr Gauci said.
Work for the company that was responsible for her brothers safety who then died?
What planet are these people on? Pay them a lump sum or pay the salary of the brother to the family for the next 10 years.
I thought insurance was mandatory to the permit to proceed with works.
When I saw this title I thought you were going to write about Suleiman Abubaker and bouncer Duncan Deguara. What a surprise- the Maltese bouncer walks free, while the poor migrant community looks on in fear of the sheer bigotry that prevails on this tiny island.
We’ve all seen it happen – bouncers refusing black people entry into clubs for no apparent reason. And now a scuffle results in the death of a human being and no one is held accountable.
Oh yes brilliant. One can only imagine what sort of job the sister will be offered.
The company should offer the family a sum of money to compansate for the tragic dead of the man. Life can’t go on as usual for this family, when the man was the breadwinner.
So Mr Bartolo, please do your duty by this family.
Does the employer not have general liability insurance coverage? Are employers not required to carry insurance on employees especially those engaged in dangerous jobs?
Employers and employees also seem to disregard safety rules. I recently saw a clip of construction workers at the Barrakka lift construction site, with no safety harness, kicking a plank in place, some 250 feet above the street level below. He was just holding on to the scaffolding with one hand!
Surely the company can do something for the victim’s family. As suggested, a lump sum plus wages for the next few years will somewhat ease his family’s anxiety and financial needs, and the sooner they do it, the better.
We tend to forget that the Artamanovs are EU citizens and have every right to come and work in Malta.
I was disgusted to see the Seabank coffee shop on the ground floor open for business as usual last week.
I suppose this is just ‘life going on’.
‘life must go on’ like it did before, that is no lessons learned and business as usual.
Fantastic post, Daphne. I doff my hat to you for writing it – and with a flourishing bow no less. When I still lived in Malta, I was shocked by the abuses that went on in construction sites, where countless ’employees’ (mostly illegal ones) were made to risk their lives without a ‘ktieb tax-xoghol’ i.e. any legal protection whatsoever, & paid a pittance to boot (and there was us thinking that official Maltese wages were low enough!).
Now and again you’d get the odd article in The Times of Malta about how a Libyan fell a few storeys and lost his life, or a Tunisian fell down a shaft etc., without there ever being any follow up, despite the police investigations which supposedly took place.
I once was also shocked whilst out on the bender at a party held at a Sliema waterside restaurant, where a Bulgarian (a supposed European brother) was treated like dirt behind the bar by his Maltese master and worked like a dog all night for (what he later confided to me) was 25 cents an hour, which he saved to send back to his family.
Truth be told, we Maltese carry out a lot of charity per capita, and of this we should be proud. But many of us are also responsible for the acute suffering of many ‘aliens’ within our own shores, and are not made accountable even for their loss of life.
Frankly, it is disgusting and unacceptable. I am not saying that these stomach-turning matters do not occur overseas, but surely the authorities in Malta can do a lot more to cut out these abuses, especially when one considers what a small area there is to police in the first place.
And if this were to occur, then perhaps the sister of this poor Latvian victim, God rest his soul, might not end up in Malta as a sex worker or lap dancer of similar. What other job can she possibly do here, unless it’s cleaning out rooms as a chambermaid?
Shame on you, B & B Holdings, and on all those who exploit these desperate foreigners. I bet that the Malta Labour Party – supposedly socialist, left-wing and in favour of the worker – has been silent about this.
The bouncer’s lawyers got in on the act after the decision – are they both preparing for the next election or just one of them?