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Guest Post: Spain's Public Servants: A Lifetime Of Serfdom
Submitted by J. Luis Martin, director of Truman Factor
Spain's Public Servants: A Lifetime Of Serfdom
They are cast as lazy and inefficient bureaucrats who don't work hard, take long coffee breaks and enjoy too many perks for being on the taxpayers' payroll. Indeed, the cliché is as universal as unfair. However, the Spanish civil service system exemplifies many of the things that are utterly wrong in the way the country is managed.
The Spanish public sector at a glance
Spain's civil service (función pública) remained virtually unchanged until the 1960s, when its rigid nineteenth-century French fonction publique mold was broken to allow for a more open Anglo-American model. In essence, this meant that access to the civil service was no longer exclusive to competitive examination and merit, as other schemes of recruitment were introduced.
Upon Franco's death, Spain’s civil service continued its steady expansion and politicization started under the dictatorship. Successive governments have embraced the American "spoils" system, which has turned a supposedly highly professionalized and independent sector into another arm of political power.
Also, they have adapted public service to Spain's ever-mutating territorial structure of "Autonomous Communities" or regions, which has ended up expanding the number of public employees by creating redundant posts, instead of decentralizing and optimizing resources.
Furthermore, the Spanish public sector's weight on the country’s economy is quite considerable when compared to other nations. According to the OECD, "Spain relies more on government employees in the production process than many other OECD countries." This is even more evident in the poorer regions such as Extremadura, where dependency on the public sector surpasses 20% of the labor force.
As per the latest official survey from July 2011, today's Spanish public sector accounts for 2.6 million people, out of which 1.6 million of are "career" funcionarios (as state employees are known) who actually earned their posts via competitive examination (oposiciones). These are the doctors, judges, teachers, police officers, soldiers, administrative clerks, and the many anonymous faces who actually keep the government running. In terms of salaries, career funcionarios earn anywhere between 1,300 and 3,000 euro per month.
The other million encompasses the universe of non-career funcionarios: full-time and temporary workers, substitutes, advisors, as well as the increasingly notorious politically-appointed "trusted employees."
A job for life
Becoming a civil servant is the Holy Grail of career paths for many due to the permanent character of civil service employment in Spain. However, securing a government job is not an easy task.
Considering that high unemployment has driven more people to apply, and since the government has cut back its public employment offers, competition today is fiercer than ever. To take part in the race for one of the few hundred clerical posts available each year in the judicial system, for example, means competing against tens of thousands. The odds of becoming a funcionario in Spain are sometimes similar to gaining access to an Ivy League university.
The typical candidate for a government job in Spain spends anywhere between one to five years preparing for the oposiciones, and often must enroll in specialized courses at private academies – a 100-200 euro per month expense, not including study materials. Undoubtedly, public service candidates undertake a grueling and expensive race for a lifetime job. While most are left out, a small handful is able to capitalize on their efforts by securing a job in the private sector (mainly in the medical and legal services industries).
An associate at one of Madrid’s top law firms said: "we often look to recruit young candidates who did not make the cut at the oposiciones. These are highly prepared individuals, who, unlike newly grads, know the law by heart – literally."
The select few who do make the cut at the oposiciones soon discover the meaning of that old adage, "be careful for what you wish," as they become victims of their own success in a perverse system.
The perversity of merit for complacency
Once the cherished civil service job is conquered, the incentives to work hard are gone: focused dedication, arduous competition and the reward of merit, the ingredients which got these funcionarios their job in the first place, are replaced by a perverse system which drives them into a lifetime of imposed complacency.
Public service chastises ambition and annihilates the individual, as there are no incentives for performance, special talents or skills. Nor are they pressured to work hard to keep the job – as the popular saying in Spain goes, a Cabinet meeting must be summoned in order to fire a bureaucrat.
"We are frustrated," a police officer says about the shrinking salaries and increased unpopularity of public workers. "We earned our jobs in fair terms, do our work and pay taxes just like the rest, but they keep coming after us."
Despite the "austerity" cutbacks, there are a few areas of government that still assign paid extra work hours, which is the closest thing to an incentive to be more productive in the Spanish public service system. However, government employees are subject to the same confiscatory tax code as the rest of the citizens they serve, so working on Saturdays for a little extra income is not attractive for some. A government clerk plainly states: "I’m no longer asking for extra hours. I need to be careful not to earn too much. I’m at the limit; if I go over, taxes would ruin me."
The perks associated with public service, such as reduced working hours, special discounts at the dentist, a little extra at the end of the year as "social action", and even low interest loans at the bank are vanishing. On the rise, however, especially due to a worsening economy and corruption scandals involving politicians and their "trusted employees," is popular dissatisfaction with the bureaucracy.
One of the problems affecting the image the general public has of its public workers is that, like in the private sector, those who get in through the back door via political appointment are the ones who give the entire workforce a bad reputation. The highest-paid funcionarios do not need to take an exam to prove their knowledge and skills in a competition of equals. They are hand-picked (friends, relatives, patrons, etc.) by a politician, as well as the usual suspects in carrying out abuse of public resources.
Reforming the public sector: perversity with a twist
The Spanish government has promised to reform the public sector to make it thinner and more efficient. In practice, however, the political machinery based on spoils is being kept intact while some very critical public functions are coming apart at the seams. This results, for example, in overcrowded courts with insufficient staff and resources that bear no resemblance to a developed nation's judiciary. Angry and less motivated public employees feel robbed of their dignity and pockets while the general population’s dissatisfaction with tax-draining, yet increasingly inefficient, public services grows.
Public workers fear a new wave of cuts in their salaries as a result of the debt-laden regional governments’ asking for more "solidarity" from those who have a secure job. Naturally, in a nation with almost 6 million unemployed, public servants will not find much support from society if they opt to go on strikes to protest additional salary cutbacks.
Just how far is the government willing to make itself redundant, especially in a time of economic crisis? Does Spain need state-journalists working for state-owned radio and television stations (there are 48 public television stations across the country)? How about the double, triple and sometimes quadruple existence of government officials and agencies due to layers and layers of local, regional and central government institutions? Unions and political parties sustained with taxpayers' money?
While getting rid of 99% of the government is a utopian dream for some, proper and effective basic institutions are fundamental for a nation's productivity and socioeconomic development. The perverse hypocrisy in sustaining political machinery and propaganda apparatus in the name of the "welfare state" has truly broken new limits under the current crisis. The system is not being reformed under the principles of efficiency. Instead, and as it is happening in the banking industry, politicians are bailing out their clientelistic sources of power and control at the expense of taxpayers.
As far as public servants are concerned, more and more are realizing that a false concept of merit astutely devised by mediocre politicians secured them not a job for life, but a lifetime of serfdom.
Originally published in El Confidencial
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just like Nigel Farages group's document on Irish debt slaves - efdgroup.eu/images/stories/Publications/news/EFD_Group_leaflet_irish .pdf
Spanish Civil Servant, isn't that a contradiction in terms? They are run by non spanish, are not civil and certainly do not serve anyone but themselves.
Dull the tip of that spear.
Cut the services so the bureaucracy has no pesky workers to adminster.
Ah, lunch, siesta, coke and hookers, dinner, samba and pinata parties, all paid for by um uh yeah Germany no? IMF hmmmm
OK, cut out the pinata parties!
They should fire the whole fucking lot of them and start again.
This time with people who actually want to work.
Some stuff about gold if anyone cares...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a85fee42-a057-11e1-88e6-00144feabdc0.html?ftca...
Where's Hernán Cortés?
American Taxpayers: A Lifetime of Serfdom
The only good news is the American tax payer makes up less than a majority of the population. There are still some free souls out there!!
Still sounds like a pretty good deal to me.
If they're serfs....what are private sector taxpayers?
Meanwhile in Greece:
Greek Pensioners Scour Trash Bins For Food
No way this can happen here in the States. Never.
I had to re-read this article since I thought I was missing the point. Why would Tyler report this? There had to be some nugget hidden but i couldnt find it. We are to feel sorry for government workers???? this is the point of the story???????
Quit. There isnt a "draft" of Spanish citizens to work in the government is there? If yes, then I feel sorry for them. If no, quit.
Fuck all those whiny bastards. We are now in for forty years of dysfunctional government thanks to the excesses of the socialists
the differences between spanish civil servants and ours are interesting. in spain the few selected, apparently the best and brightest, are then left to languish in a moribund, frustrating gulag, while our civil servants are the dregs (imo) and contentedly spending their days perusing split ends and fauxbook connections. both systems fail...evidence perhaps that in either case civil servants are redundant and replacable; as so many manufactoring jobs have been by computers and robots.
I agree that once the hurdle to get into the Civil Service has been jumped for most people 'the incentives to work hard are gone'.
However, this does underestimate the Capacity, integrity and calibre of the average Government employee and his ability to achieve more than he is currently achieving.
I worked in the UK Civil Service for many years and I was generally impressed with the comittment, application and overall merit of staff - at least during their first few months or years of service.
The problem (in the UK at least) lies in the system. The system is sclerotic, immutable, old fashioned and stupid. It destroys good people by wearing them down. The really good people leave quickly, the average people get beaten down and just 'function' at work - only reacting to work rather than managing it while the stupid say 'cheers easy' and get all their mates in and put their feet up. It doesn't help that the lower grades might come from 'certain' ethnic groups so making any criticism of their performance illegal.
The only way to solve this problem is to CUT it and start again. Managing change is one of the hardest tasks of a businessman and Politicians are simply not up to it.
It is, however, a great place to learn Process mappping, as the way the Government does something is sure to be to most complicated way imaginable. This is why huge numbers of staff can spend long hours achieving very little. Indeed, what little that is achieved is often nugatory by the time it is produced...
Managing change is one of the hardest tasks of a businessman and Politicians are simply not up to it.
That is because both are parasites: When a host organism or organisation is under attack by parasites, the escape is to evolve at a faster rate than the parasites. Therefore "Change is Bad", *every* TV-show, movie, reinforces this by always restoring Status Quo.
The difference between business and politics is that the business person seeks to drive the evolution of the host in a direction that ejects the competing parasites but leaves himself. This is harder to do than politics because the politicians operate on an "ecosystem level": Should one particular host die, they can just latch on to another. If change is too fast, making resource extraction look like work, they just make disincentives to change so that even their 3-rd generation, half-retard, inbred children can go into politics straight from university. With pretty much the skillset Grandad had 90 years ago!
A feature of the 00'ies is how business men are merging with politicians and learning how to fail upwards, to cushier, more highly paid jobs for every business they drive into the ground.
Tend to agree fajensen. Although I would differentiate True Businessmen from the Crony Capitalists (who are also parasites) that increasingly infect the economy.
A catharsis (which is what I think I sugggested) is the way forward.
And we are going to get one......
"for example, in overcrowded courts with insufficient staff and resources that bear no resemblance to a developed nation's judiciar"
Same in US if that still counts as a developed nation.
Could easily substitute "Canada" for "Spain" in this, probably "Australia" and "New Zealand" as well.
Wow this sounds so familiar from my country: ______
"The perversity of merit for complacency
Once the cherished civil service job is conquered, the incentives to work hard are gone: focused dedication, arduous competition and the reward of merit, the ingredients which got these funcionarios their job in the first place, are replaced by a perverse system which drives them into a lifetime of imposed complacency.
Public service chastises ambition and annihilates the individual, as there are no incentives for performance, special talents or skills. Nor are they pressured to work hard to keep the job – as the popular saying in Spain goes, a Cabinet meeting must be summoned in order to fire a bureaucrat."
+1 if you've heard of or have relatives who tell stories about the laid back life in public service. Such as: Group nap times. Yes, my jaw dropped when I heard a relative say they had a group nap time. Jaw dropped through the ground into China when a gung ho new recruit came into the department and was told to slow down because people were getting annoyed due to this new hire working too hard... it was making everybody else look bad.
Yes.
Granted, not all branches of the service are the same, but no wonder why people want to get into there and those who have dreams of doing something great are shattered.
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