Charting household wellbeing in Malta. Critical reflections by a member of the research group on the reception of the group’s proposed definition and estimates of the national living income in Malta

Abstract

To improve their capacity to engage in social dialogue on the issues of, among others, poverty and specifically in-work poverty in Malta, the General Workers Union (GWU) along with project partners, the Alliance Against Poverty (AfK) and Graffitti, issued a tender for research on the National Living Income (NLI) in Malta. The GWU assigned the tender to Rethink Advisory and an interdisciplinary team of researchers was selected by the assignee to carry out the project. The researchers eventually produced the Report, ‘A Proposal Towards the Definition and Estimates of the National Living Income in Malta’ (Gravina et al., 2022). The working definition adopted for NLI was “the net annual income required for a household in Malta to afford a decent standard of living for all members of that household”. Primary and secondary data were gathered and analysed following both a qualitative and quantitative methodology. The map of households that emerged illustrated the inequality that pervades Maltese society - pensionable and single adult households being relegated well below the statistical reference points indicating a decent standard of living for these households. The results were discussed at a number of public fora and with all the social partners. Following the first part of the essay in which the present author and NLI co-researcher describes and discusses at length the contents of the Report in order to establish its potential claim to attention, the rest of the essay critically reflects on the aftermath following the publication of the report and its dissemination in public fora. Among others, it discusses the way civil and political society engaged with this NLI estimates initiative. The focus on political and civil society and reflection on the follow-up on the research was enriched by adopting certain notions from Antonio Gramsci’s conceptual armature as developed in his Prison Notebooks.