Public employment: a law from the last millennium
The Government has approved the Catalan public employment billwhich will replace the regulations in force since 1997. Having passed the first quarter of the 21st century, and given the content of the document, it is clear that public employment will remain under a model designed in the last millennium. The Government feels comfortable maintaining a status quo which he believes is immutable and refuses to reflect deeply on what the country needs in this chapter.
Some initial notes.Despite the experience accumulated over almost 50 years of self-government and 30 years of applying the law that will soon expire, the Government is already content to maintain as many public functions as there are administrations: more than a thousand, counting local entities and public universities. Under a self-serving interpretation of respect for local and university autonomy, the Government seems to find it acceptable for each entity to have its own civil servants and for the mobility of public employees, which should be agile and permanent to address emerging needs, to be contingent upon formal accreditations and the signing of inter-administrative agreements. Without these, selection processes will continue where, as Minister Dalmau has announced, there is an intention to shorten the execution times to less than two years—no small matter. Thus, a complicated, fragmented, and unfairly differentiated public employment system will be maintained. Recall, not so long ago, the scandal of the remuneration of parliamentary officials.
Catalonia has fought to ensure its police force has almost full powers in matters of public safety. However, no one—not even this government—has questioned whether the best solution for organizing certain public services is to place teaching, healthcare, or other essential public service personnel within state bodies and ranks, and to subject some civil servants to the orders of ministerial authorities. Furthermore, at the beginning of the millennium, when it came to designing a new model, no resources were deemed necessary to assess whether it is appropriate for the public agents providing these services to be civil servants, without considering what only occurs in Catalonia: the coexistence of these civil servants with a significant number of other public employees.
No time has been wasted analyzing whether a public employment model that allows a contracted doctor at the Hospital Clínic to perform the same work as a tenured doctor at the Hospital Vall d'Hebron is rational, consistent, functional, and efficient. The same could be said of the teaching profession, where added public value should lie in the competence and qualifications of teachers, not in whether they are tenured or contracted staff. And what rationale explains why local secretarial, auditing, and treasury positions must be held by civil servants who eat separately from others performing the same duties?
The approved project in no way corrects the abuse—due to a lack of enabling legislation—practiced by the State in this matter. It also endorses the continued erosion of Catalonia's exclusive competence, established in the Statute of Autonomy, over personnel serving our administrations and the organization and regulation of the civil service, through a spurious application of framework laws on other matters, which have been exploited to create these state-level bodies.
It is necessary to conclude these initial remarks by highlighting that the regulation in question dedicates a chapter, with a single article, to regulating an institution of an organizational nature, inappropriate for public employment: professional public management. This complicates its treatment by failing to consider that The government itself is finalizing a preliminary draft. In this matter, the rule will only apply in your home.
There are solutions for all the pathologies mentioned. but they are disruptive And, as has been seen, today we have a Government satisfied to manage the public services of yet another autonomous community: a Government that avoids acting as a national government as much as possible, a Government prone to interpreting constitutional precepts in a way that is most detrimental to the interests of the country, as demonstrated by some of its members following the application of Article 155.
We are, therefore, faced with a project that, while it foresees instrumental reforms, reveals a lack of ambition and courage to start anew, and shows that the short-term focus on presenting results and the Lampedusian tic prevail —once again— over addressing the structural transformations of a public employment system that we need to adapt to real needs and retain the best talent.