A Lifetime Of Serfdom

Spain's Public Servants

by J. Luis Martin 

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-paidfuncionarios 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.