Of redundancies and new jobs

Where are the 20,000 jobs created in Malta and Gozo between 2008 and 2011? Government says it adds together new full-time and part-time jobs and redundancies. Since when and where in the world are redundancies included in the statistics about the number of new jobs created? Being made redundant means you lose the job you had and not start a new one.

The pre-budget document published a few days ago by Finance Minister Tonio Fenech shows that only 4,256 jobs were created between 2008 and 2011. So where are the 20,000 jobs?

Reporting on the number of new part-time and full-time jobs created in Malta, the EU's statistical agency Eurostat, says that the number of persons employed in Malta for more than one hour per week, has increased from 160,600 at the end of 2007 to 170,300 in 2011, an increase of 9,700 persons.

Labour MEP Professor Edward Scicluna was given these statistics after submitting a question to the European Parliament. Prof Scicluna said: "What prompted me to ask these questions was the surprisingly unorthodox formula presented as to how 'new jobs' were calculated for the Prime Minister. The inclusion of redundancies seemed to me highly questionable and bordering on the downright unacceptable. But I wanted the confirmation of the Commission on this. It is very amateurish and irresponsible for an official or advisor to pass on data to the Prime Minister based on such spurious estimations, especially when more officially reliable data from Eurostat is available. But I suppose Eurostat's data is not there to serve the government's agenda."

Every time Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi and his propaganda machine mentions the 20,000 new jobs created, remember that those statistics include the number of persons who lost their jobs.

Keep also in mind what former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi used to say of a politician who used statistics to bolster his weak arguments: “He uses statistics like a drunk uses lamp-posts, more for support than illumination.
Also remember what 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli used to say, according to Mark Twain:  "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."