A hero against the shortsightedness of the civil servant

Recently, I have had the pleasure of adding a new hero to my shelf. I am happy because, as you will understand, it is not easy to find people worthy of this recognition. These heroes of mine serve me to be able to mirror myself and take example. Also, and this point is fundamental, to feed confidence in the species. The man I am talking about is a normal, ordinary individual. Juan Carlos Nieto, a civil servant of the State Public Employment Service (SEPE), is someone with enough judgment and convictions to swim against the tide. In a way, he is a revolutionary capable of contradicting the rules of a system that runs the risk of becoming demented.Juan Carlos Nieto has been a public servant for 37 years. Currently, and for the past fifteen years, he has been working at the SEPE in Mérida. Juan Carlos has had a disciplinary file opened against him for attending to some citizens who showed up at the office without a prior appointment. When he had no one waiting in line, he would answer their queries and facilitate the corresponding procedures, such as issuing them a certificate. He is accused of not obeying the office director and potentially discriminating against users who did have appointments. "I never stopped attending someone with an appointment to attend to another person who didn't have one. When there was capacity and someone arrived with an urgent need and there was an opening, I tried to help, but not out of charity, simply because it's my job," he explained to Eldiario.es. The appointment system, a mechanism massively implemented during the pandemic, has become the usual and sometimes only way to access public services. Although it can improve organization, it ends up marginalizing certain groups, because not everyone has access to a computer or the skills to carry out the often complicated procedures digitally. This is notably happening with people of a certain age. Juan Carlos Nieto insisted that he did not intend to cause any controversy, but he expressed gratitude to the many citizens who have demonstrated outside his office to show their support.In the world of public administration, and sometimes equally in the private company, the system invites the person to do nothing that goes a millimeter beyond what is absolutely essential. No one is rewarded for transcending, even slightly, the boundaries of what are supposed to be their strict obligations. Over time, the worker's reaction is logically to limit themselves to doing what is required. To cling to established procedures. Often because they don't want to do more than they are paid for. But many other times also because they know from experience that having their own ideas or wanting to move forward with some initiative ends up costing them.

This culture and these messages, explicit or not, not only discourage and demotivate people who truly want to do their job well, but are also grains of sand thrown into the gears of any organization. Their result is inefficiency and slowness. A product of this is also the insane multiplication of paperwork, when what would be needed is the minimum indispensable. It is a vicious circle and, if action is not taken with determination, it can end up making any contact with the administration unbearable. It is not surprising, then, that one of the main complaints, apart from the lack of resources, from farmers, fishermen, doctors or teachers and professors, is precisely the excess of paperwork and the suffocating bureaucratic burden. You only have to issue a simple invoice to, for example, the Generalitat de Catalunya to know what kind of hell we are talking about.In the end, what has happened to Juan Carlos Nieto, the protagonist of this article, is that he is being forced to do what the vast majority of civil servants do: look at the finger and not the Moon. To cling to regulations and close their eyes to the rest. It doesn't matter if this means, scandalously, sabotaging the objective that is supposed to be pursued: serving the citizen. We could call it civil servant myopia, a kind of alienation that connects directly with that "Vuelva usted mañana" by Larra and with the agonizing Kafkaesque nightmares. Depending on how the proceedings against Juan Carlos Nieto turn out, two radically opposite signals can be sent. If he is punished, civil servant myopia will be encouraged, that is, they will be told to cling to the letter of the rule as much as possible, to withdraw, to do only what is essential. That what matters are the procedures. If he is not punished, it means there is still hope. Because they will be invited to be more flexible, to have initiative and judgment and, in short, to be human.