How come you need someone and at the same time treat them badly? Of course, we are talking about foreign human resources that cover a number of very sensitive professions. So how can we be so inflexible with these workers, so formalistic and so strictly committed to a law that obviously does not serve our needs and realities, but ideologies of xenophobic and even racist? In the 1960s, the Swiss playwright Max Frisch was forced to admit: “We asked for workers. “People came instead.”
These were the Greek and Italian immigrants who built Germany through the ruins of World War II and in addition to workers were people with similar needs and not just “guest workers”. It took the summer of 2015, when hundreds of thousands of refugees and immigrants were coming to Europe, to change perceptions with the historic phrase: “We will make it” by Angela Merkel. Do we still insist on wanting “guest workers” in Cyprus?
In fact, as long as we do not know what we really want to achieve, we will never “succeed”. When your goal is to get as much as possible from the “guest workers” and give them back as little as possible, but also to “get rid” of them before they gain political or other rights, that is neither a fair nor a realistic goal and certainly it is not worth it to succeed. And yet, are we not trying to achieve this by setting low wages, restrictions on work and social advancement, little chance of gaining political rights, and even contributions to social security funds for pensions they will never receive? We have the same treatment for their employers. Whether it is for the elderly who need real support or for production units, the procedures are so exhausting that you have to “testify” in the hands of the public service, before bringing an employee to Cyprus. It is this distortion that they have spotted and set up an industry to import foreign workers, under the guise of our education system.
The revocation of student work permits short-circuited the black college work industry that had been set up, but did not solve the problem.
On the contrary, he highlighted the reasons why it flourished and it was not only the desire of these young people for a better fortune abroad, but also the need of the foreign country, ie Cyprus, for their work. To the stereotypical but also charged with xenophobia finding, “we filled strangers”, the answer is that “and yet we need more to meet our needs”. Stopping the smuggling of workers is legitimate, but not introducing a simple, fast, efficient, transparent staffing process and not creating the conditions for their real integration.
What needs to be done now is for the political world of Cyprus to finally bear the cost and tell the truth to society. That is, we should make the transition to a multinational state. How without foreign workers, our quality of life and our economy will be dangerously degraded. How should we “manage” to utilize the potential of all the workforce that is in the country regardless of nationality, in a way that integrates the population into society and the economy. This may send the far right to double digits, as was the case in Germany, but the country cannot be held hostage by ultra-conservative voters. Of course, we are not going to pursue an open border policy. It is the practices of other European countries, Canada and Australia, that we have to adapt to our own needs and our own realities. We have already taken the first step with the incentive package for “white collar” employees of the Ministry of Finance. Now, we have to see how we regulate the issue of the migrant labor market as a whole.
