Workers' quality of life has worsened.
The objective indicators do not support the claim that workers are generally worse off. Standard benchmarks point in the opposite direction: Malta's HDI is at an all-time high, real net earnings have grown cumulatively across the legislature, employment is at record levels, severe material and social deprivation is at a series low, and the at-risk-of-poverty-or-social-exclusion rate has been broadly flat to improving. The lived-experience picture is mixed, not uniformly negative. On the positive side: air quality has improved materially since the 2017 LNG conversion (SO₂ at urban stations down sharply), life expectancy is among the EU's highest and still rising, beach water quality scores 98-99% 'excellent' on EEA testing year on year, crime rates have continued a long-run decline, and per-capita green open space has expanded with Project Green delivering 325,000+ sqm across 2022-2024. On the negative side: vehicle density has risen roughly 20% over the decade (now one of the EU's highest) and the house-price-to-income ratio has moved out of the healthy 5-7x band into a 10-12x range. Real pressures sit alongside real improvements — the broad 'workers' quality of life has worsened' framing does not survive once both sides are charted honestly.
The objective indicators do not support the claim that workers are generally worse off. Standard benchmarks point in the opposite direction: Malta's HDI is at an all-time high, real net earnings have grown cumulatively across the legislature, employment is at record levels, severe material and social deprivation is at a series low, and the at-risk-of-poverty-or-social-exclusion rate has been broadly flat to improving. The lived-experience picture is mixed, not uniformly negative. On the positive side: air quality has improved materially since the 2017 LNG conversion (SO₂ at urban stations down sharply), life expectancy is among the EU's highest and still rising, beach water quality scores 98-99% 'excellent' on EEA testing year on year, crime rates have continued a long-run decline, and per-capita green open space has expanded with Project Green delivering 325,000+ sqm across 2022-2024. On the negative side: vehicle density has risen roughly 20% over the decade (now one of the EU's highest) and the house-price-to-income ratio has moved out of the healthy 5-7x band into a 10-12x range. Real pressures sit alongside real improvements — the broad 'workers' quality of life has worsened' framing does not survive once both sides are charted honestly.
We tested Borg's broad 'quality of life has worsened' framing against the standard international objective benchmarks that cover Malta — HDI, real net earnings, AROPE, SMSD, employment rate — while separately checking the Maltese-press perception surveys on housing affordability, traffic and overcrowding that anchor the lived-experience side of the claim. The two tests resolve differently: the objective indicators move the opposite way to the framing, while the perception-side surveys support real grievances on specific axes. The verdict applies to the broad headline; the deep-dive lays out the data on both sides.
Are Maltese workers actually worse off than four years ago
It's the question every voter ends up asking before they walk into the polling booth. Are we doing better than we were four years ago?
In 2022, Labour built a chunk of its election pitch around 'kwalità tal-ħajja' — the promise that working people would have a better quality of life. Four years later in Pieta, Alex Borg told the crowd that 'according to an official survey', the picture today is different. So what does the data actually say?
The single biggest-picture number
The most-cited international measure of quality of life is the United Nations Human Development Index. It blends three things — how long people live, how educated they are, and how much income per person the country has — into a single 0-to-1 score. It's the closest thing to an objective 'is life getting better here' benchmark.
For Malta, the latest published HDI is 0.924 for 2023, up from 0.915 in 2022. That isn't just a tick up. It's the highest score Malta has ever recorded across the entire 1980-2023 series the UN publishes. Forty-three years of data, and Malta sits at the top of its own chart.
Borg's framing — that workers are quietly worse off than they were when Labour took power — is hard to square with that number.
What the European living-conditions data shows
The HDI is a high-altitude view. The more granular picture comes from EU-SILC, the EU-wide survey on income and living conditions. NSO publishes Malta's slice every year. The headline numbers for 2024 (the latest released):
- Severe material and social deprivation (SMSD) rate: 4.0%, down 0.1pp from 2023 and 1.4pp lower than 2021
- At-risk-of-poverty-or-social-exclusion (AROPE) rate: 19.7%, down 0.1pp from 2023
- At-risk-of-poverty rate: 16.8%, up a small 0.2pp
- Life satisfaction for the population most exposed to deprivation: mean score 7.1, up 0.1
The clearest signal is in the deprivation series. SMSD measures the share of people who can't afford 7 or more of 13 essentials — things like keeping the home warm, replacing worn-out furniture, or a week's holiday away from home. Across the legislature, the rate peaked at 5.4% in 2021 and has fallen each year since to 4.0% in 2024 — its lowest point in the series. None of these indicators describe a country whose workers' lives are quietly falling apart.
The World Happiness Report's 2025 score for Malta sits at 6.32 out of 10 — solidly in the upper-middle band of European countries.
Real net earnings — what workers actually take home
The HDI captures the broad envelope. The narrowest test of Borg's specific claim — workers' material conditions — is real net earnings: take-home pay after income tax and social-insurance contributions, deflated by HICP inflation. Eurostat publishes a comparable series (earn_nt_net) for every EU member.
For a single worker on the average wage in Malta, real net earnings rose roughly +5% cumulatively across 2020-2024. The 2022-2023 inflation surge produced a one-year real-wage dip — common to almost every EU country — but Malta's recovery in 2024 (+3.2% real) was strong enough to land the four-year window comfortably positive. On the same Eurostat series, Malta sits in the upper half of the EU on cumulative real-wage performance.
Employment rate — record-high participation
Borg's claim is specifically about workers. The most direct workers-have-jobs measure — the Eurostat employment rate (lfsi_emp_a, age 20-64) — shows Malta at roughly 82% in 2024, an all-time high, up from 75.6% in 2020. Female employment, full-time employment and labour-force participation are all at record levels. Unemployment sits near full-employment thresholds.
This is the strongest single rebuttal of the literal Borg framing. If workers were 'worse off than four years ago' in any common-sense material sense, the labour market would not be running at record-high participation with record-low unemployment. Both indicators move the opposite way to the claim.
Lived indicators — a mixed picture
Beyond the headline economic measures, the actual day-to-day quality-of-life indicators tell a more nuanced story than Borg's framing implies. Several lived measures have moved clearly in the right direction across the legislature. Two — traffic and housing affordability — have moved the wrong way, and those are real and worth charting honestly. The point is not that everything has improved; it's that the broader picture is mixed, not uniformly negative.
Where the lived data has moved the right way:
Where the lived data has moved the wrong way:
The honest reading is that lived experience under this legislature has been mixed. Air quality, life expectancy, beach water quality, crime rates and per-capita green space have moved the right way. Vehicle density and house-price-to-income ratios have moved the wrong way. Both directions matter; neither cancels the other.
So is the claim accurate?
The objective indicators do not support the claim that workers are generally worse off. Standard benchmarks point in the opposite direction: Malta's HDI is at an all-time high, real net earnings have grown cumulatively across the legislature, employment is at record levels, severe material and social deprivation is at a series low, and the at-risk-of-poverty-or-social-exclusion rate has been broadly flat to improving.
The lived-experience picture is mixed rather than negative. On the axes the perception case usually invokes — housing affordability, traffic congestion — pressure is real. But on a wider set of lived indicators the direction of travel is positive:
- Air quality. The 2017 conversion of Delimara from heavy fuel oil to LNG produced a step-change reduction in SO₂ and particulate emissions. EEA and Eurostat air-quality monitoring show Malta well within EU limit values on SO₂ and PM10, with PM2.5 trending down across the legislature.
- Life expectancy. Maltese life expectancy is among the highest in the EU and still rising — life expectancy at birth has gained roughly a year across the legislature, with women now at ~85 and men at ~81.
- Beach water quality. EEA bathing-water assessments rate 98-99% of Maltese beach sites 'excellent' year on year — Malta sits near the top of the EU table.
- Crime rates. Police-recorded crime in Malta has continued the long-run decline of the past decade. Violent-crime rates remain among the lowest in the EU.
- Per-capita green open space. Project Green delivered over 325,000 square metres of new or regenerated green open space across 2022-2024, with 28 projects completed in 2023-24 alone.
The 'workers' quality of life has worsened' framing does not survive once the full set of lived indicators sits next to the objective benchmarks. Verdict: Misleading.