The extent of validity and applicability of the wage regulation orders within the current changes affecting the labour market and the labour legislation

Abstract

Wage Regulation Orders (WROs) are Subsidiary Legislation (SL) forming part of the labour law legislation corpus of Malta. Their role is to regulate the conditions of employment of employees working within certain industry sectors of the local labour market (LM) and are often referred to as being rigid in nature, archaic and in contrast to the spirit of the Employment and Industrial Relations Act (EIRA). The latter was promulgated with the idea of being able to respond quickly and efficiently to the ever changing conditions of the LM through an inbuilt mechanism of Legal Notices (LNs) to amend the SL which to date number to 85 amendments not considering that Legal Notice (LN) 427 of 2007 had amended 55 different SL of the employment legislation in correspondence to the change of currency from the Maltese Lira to the Euro in the following year. There are currently thirty-one WROs in force which were all promulgated under the Conditions of Employment (Regulations) Act (CERA) in between 1953 and 2001. The WROs became of interest to the author in 2009 when he was assigned to work within the Inspectorate Section of the Department of Industrial and Employment Relations (DIER), obtaining a first-hand insight into the application and validity of the WROs in the current LM. The author was at once fascinated by the Wages Councils (WCLs) system whereby the WROs were discussed between the representatives of the employers, the employees as well as an independent party acting as a sort of mediator and the fact that the legislation itself had not been amended in a long time. This led to an intensive analysis of the development of the WROs from their conception to date which can be seen in this study. A definition of what the WROs are introduces this essay followed by a brief resume of their development in the local perspective and their application in the LM as well as some background information on the origins of the trade unions and collective agreements in Malta which was deemed essential to this study. This essay mainly concerns the functioning of the WCLs, the origins of the WCLs and WROS and the applicability and validity of the WROs within the LM. This is done through the discussion of the continuous development which has occurred in the National Standard Order (NSO) since the implementation of EIRA as well as the radical new developments within the local labour law of rights and obligations of the employees which were not present under the CERA. Finally, the essay looks in to the argument of whether the WROs are still applicable and valid in the modern LM and draws the relative conclusions in the concluding section.