The president of the Chamber of Commerce wants robot waiters.
William Spiteri Bailey’s pitch, as reported this week, is that automated servers could ease Malta’s reliance on imported labour. You order through a member of staff or an app, and a robot brings the food to your table.
I’ve got questions.
What’s the point of a robot waiter if you step over vomit and garbage to get to the restaurant, and have to dodge scaffolding and construction debris as you’re leaving?
And will the robot waiter charge itself? Or, like the freezers, will it power off when the electricity goes out?
That second one isn’t a joke.
We’ve just come through a summer of outages bad enough that the Prime Minister issued an “unconditional” apology (whatever that’s worth), the Opposition tabled a motion of no confidence in the energy minister, and Spiteri Bailey himself conceded there were instances where nobody took political ownership for what happened. Into that grid, we’re proposing to plug a fleet of machines costing about €13,000 a pop.
Paid for, he suggests, by tax credits.
Which is a curious solution for an industry that spends most of its public breath telling us its margins are too thin to survive and its VAT is too high to bear.
If a restaurant can’t afford a pay rise for the person carrying the plates, I’m not sure a subsidised android is the sensible next purchase.
Our problems run deeper than foreign labour
Here’s what actually breaks a restaurant and a tourism industry, and it isn’t the nationality of the person serving your table.
It’s turnover.
A workforce that’s almost guaranteed to churn itself over every 2 years is already a massive problem, and no amount of automation solves that.
How is someone who’s been here for a year supposed to know enough to recommend the local winemaker, or this local produce over one shipped in from Europe?
How are they supposed to recommend a good beach, or a restaurant, or sights worth seeing, if they’re basically just visiting themselves?
You can’t automate institutional memory.
You can’t automate the waiter who tells you the qagħaq tal-għasel came in this morning, or that you should skip the Comino cruise and drive to Dingli Cliffs instead.
That’s the product. That’s the thing tourists actually pay for, and that’s what’s disappeared while we debate robotics.
Which brings us neatly to Spiteri Bailey’s own statistic. He says just 0.1% of GDP growth can be attributed to increased productivity, and the rest comes from adding more workers. He’s right, and it’s damning. But we’re also apparently hitting our 2035 target of 4.5 million tourists years early, while spend between January and May actually fell against last year.
More people.
Less money.
And the proposed fix is a machine that carries chips.
The audit nobody wants to talk about
The Chamber has known the answer to this for 5 years. It’s just gone quiet about it.
Back in 2021, the Malta Chamber and the Gozo Business Chamber went public with the fact that their members were haemorrhaging staff to government jobs, and that people were taking those jobs even at lower pay.
They said overstaffing across government departments and entities was eliminating business competitiveness.
They called for an independent review of public sector employment to build a leaner administration, and suggested seconding underemployed public sector bodies back into private companies.
And then they said the really important bit. Companies were replacing the Maltese employees they’d lost to government with other nationalities.
They had to, obviously. Someone has to do the job, so if the locals don’t want to, because cushy jobs aplenty are available, we’ve been brilliant at finding poorer sods than us to do the jobs we don’t want. Sinjur żgħir il-Malti after all.
So the sequence is on record, in the Chamber’s own words. Government absorbs local workers into roles nobody needed filled. The private sector plugs the hole with imported labour.
And in 2026, the Chamber’s president proposes we plug the next hole with a €13,000 robot.
We have a shadow workforce that does sweet nothing all day except sap at the national productivity index by shuffling between government offices and pretending to shuffle papers.
That’s where your missing productivity is hiding. Not the South Asian in the dining room.
I’ve done the job
Evidently, the reason behind such a farcical statement is that Mr Spiteri Bailey has never worked in a restaurant for a single afternoon, nor ever spoken to a diner.
I have.
I cut my teeth in catering nearly 20 years ago, in the heyday of the industry, when local kids had no problem working these jobs.
Mostly we were students making a buck part time in the evenings and weekends, but there were also people for whom hospitality became a career, or who were training for it properly.
The work was relatively okay paid. Not well paid, but okay. And it wasn’t looked down on, or at least, not as looked down on as it is today.
And guess what. I’m goddamn proud of my catering roots. Il-catering iġibek nies we used to say, and I still believe it.
There are 4 of us siblings at home. All 4 worked in restaurants and hotels from age 16 upwards, until we made our way in life.
It taught us the value of hard work and the value of a buck you earned.
From day one, I worked in quality establishments.
I learned about fine ingredients and wines and all the niceties, sure.
But mostly I learned about the pride of serving quality.
While my friends worked at Pizza Hut or McDonald’s (which, putting snobbery aside and in full fairness to them are both workplaces that taught a lot of people about a lot of things, process and service among them), I was at the Radisson learning silver service. I moved to the Hilton not long after, and my sense of pride in the team’s work kept growing.
And looking back, I was probably a little naive too.
But I was genuinely proud of the service we gave, the attention to detail, the knowledge that what we served and how we served it was among the best you could get in Malta.
To this day, my hatred of mediocrity spurs me forward. I learned that disgust for the mediocre right there on the restaurant floor.
What the job actually teaches you
If there’s one thing I genuinely and humbly believe, it’s that Systemato, the agency I founded, has a special customer-centric something built into it, and that it comes straight from the catering world.
The customer pays your wage when they pay their bill. So you serve the best product in the best way possible, you meet and exceed expectations, and you’ll have justified what you’re getting paid.
The same thing applies to creative agency work.
Being of service is not demeaning, but it’s uplifting.
Being genuinely proud of the work you do, and the food and drink and experiences you serve, is a great thing to have.
This applies to a young kid making their way up in the world.
It applies to a founder who is now in his 16th year of running the business (me).
And it applies to a tiny nation which is finding out the hard way that whoring ourselves out to any bidder, not even the highest one, is no way to run our affairs.
Buy the damn robot if you like. It still won’t know which beach to send the guests to. And the beach could be full of raw sewage too.
