Malta Construction Worker’s Viral TikTok: ‘Animals Get Better Treatment Than Us’ Sparks National Heat-Strike Debate

Watch: ‘Animals are treated better than us construction workers’
By Hot Malta Staff | 09 June 2025, 07:00 CEST

A 43-second TikTok clip filmed last week on a dusty Ħamrun side-street has detonated across Maltese group chats like a summer firework. In the video, shot on a colleague’s phone at 13:45 under a 36 °C sun, plasterer Clayton Borg removes his dust-caked mask and spits grit from his mouth. “Look at that,” he says, camera panning to a neighbour’s ginger cat lounging under a ceiling fan on a plush sofa. “Even the cats get AC and water. Animals are treated better than us construction workers.” The clip ends with Borg’s exhausted laugh; it has already racked up 620 000 views and 11 000 comments, many from fellow Maltese workers posting their own heat-exhaustion selfies.

The timing is lethal. Malta is in the middle of a record-breaking June heatwave, hospitalising five workers in two days, while Parliament is debating a fast-track bill that would allow developers to skip summer-time work permits if projects promise “national economic interest”. Clayton’s throw-away line has become a national lightning rod, exposing the island’s addiction to 24-hour building sites and the human cost of its concrete gold-rush.

“Animals are treated better than us” is not just hyperbole; it is legally true. Malta’s 2002 Animal Welfare Act mandates that pets must be provided with “adequate ventilation, shade and fresh water at all times”. Construction workers, by contrast, fall under EU Directive 89/391, transposed into Maltese law, which merely obliges employers to take “reasonable measures” against heat stress. Reasonable is elastic: while site owners hand out cheap paper cups every three hours, there is no statutory maximum temperature at which work must stop. “We’re asking for what a hamster gets by right,” Clayton tells Hot Malta, still in dusty overalls outside the Mrieħel depot where he waits for the next job. “A shade cloth, a fan, cold water that isn’t yellow from the tank. That’s it.”

The Maltese twist is cultural. For three generations the island’s working-class pride has been carved in limestone. Grandfathers who built Valletta’s post-war apartments brag about carrying 50 kg blocks up ladders “with a cigarette in our mouth”. Their sons, the 1980s boom generation, turned Qormi fields into flats and wore calluses like medals. Today’s 20-something labourers – many on zero-hour contracts imported by sub-sub-contractors – have no pension, no sick leave and, crucially, no stoic silence. They grew up on TikTok, not ta’ Qali tales, and they speak the language of memes, not machismo. Clayton’s video is therefore a class generational hand-over: the old “qiegħda tibni lil Malta” (you’re building Malta) mantra replaced by “qed inbnew bin-nar” (we’re building in fire).

Community impact is already visible. Within 48 hours a Facebook group “Ħaddiema Kontra s-Sħana” (Workers Against Heat) attracted 18 000 members sharing GPS-tagged photos of sites without canopies. A spontaneous protest saw 200 workers down tools at the Tigné Point excavation last Friday, forcing MIDI plc to issue a rare apology and promise “cooling tents” by Monday. The Malta Developers Association reacted frostily, warning that “further restrictions will push investment to Sicily”. Yet even the Catholic archdiocese weighed in; Archbishop Charles Scicluna tweeted the TikTok clip with the caption: “If we safeguard sparrows, shall we not safeguard those who build our nests?”

Politicians are scrambling. Opposition leader Bernard Grech visited a Paola site at dawn, hard-hat theatrically askew, calling for an immediate 32 °C stop-work threshold. Labour’s new minister for social dialogue, Andy Ellul, countered with a pledge to “fast-track” a pilot scheme for air-conditioned rest caravans – financed, inevitably, by a €2 million EU recovery fund that still needs Brussels approval. Meanwhile, the General Workers’ Union is collecting signatures to trigger the first construction-sector strike since 1977, when limestone cutters walked out over powdered-silica dangers.

Back in Ħamrun, Clayton Borg is astonished by the storm his half-minute rant unleashed. “I just wanted a breather,” he shrugs, buying a €1 ħobż biż-żejt from a kiosk that now offers him free Kinnie “for the hero who spoke up”. But the kiosk owner, a 66-year-old former mason, sums up the national mood: “We used to build churches that lasted 500 years. Now we build flats that melt in July. Maybe it’s time we built some dignity too.”

As cranes continue to bristle over Sliema like a steel forest, the question echoes beyond Clayton’s video: will Malta’s economic miracle finally recognise the humans who pour its foundations, or will the island keep treating its builders as disposable as the rubble they haul away? The answer will determine not just labour law, but the moral skyline of a country that has long confused progress with concrete.