Six Pillars to Reform Public Employment
Since 2010, Italy has passed several measures to contain spending for public employees in the name of the austerity mantra. The reduction in the total number of employees was achieved by blocking the turnover of personnel, as collective bargaining for new contracts was suspended and public managers saw their salaries cut.
These are trends common to many other OECD countries: some have set either a percentage or an absolute number target in order to shrink public employment (e.g. minus 12% by 2014 for the Irish Civil Service and minus 120,000-150,000 employees in the Netherlands), others have set limits to replacements due to generational turnover (Spain and Greece currently hire just one employee for every ten that retire, while France and Austria one out of two). Many countries have frozen wage increases (the UK, Netherlands, Canada, the US etc), others have opted for an outright wage cut (Spain and Greece). And in July, Portugal proposed that public employees put in a longer workweek (from 35 to 40 hours) at unchanged wages.
Although aligned with such trends on the surface, Italy wavers in the implementation of such moves, engendering uncertainty and contradictions. Consider for instance the 2012 decision of the Constitutional Court, which ruled that cuts to managers' salaries are unconstitutional, or the July 2013 vote by the Senate not to go ahead with a 25% cut in managerial compensation for listed, government-owned companies. Also, the projected government hiring of 120 people to work on EU cohesion policies seems to contradict the logic of economic sustainability and procedural transparency in public employment, as the Labor Committee of the Senate did not fail to note.
But most of all, what lacks in Italy vis-à-vis OECD countries is a broad long-term strategy to have the right number and quality of employees to overcome the challenges that lie ahead for the public sector. A true reform should revolve around six pillars: overcoming traditional bureaucratic models by promoting organizational flexibility and responsibility; containing the aging trend among public servants (almost half of them are over 50) by attracting young talent (e.g. with ad hoc contracts for new graduates, as it happens in Germany and the US); introducing competency management to support a better use of human resources and more modern HR management; a stronger emphasis on motivation, by working on immaterial incentives, fostering positive work environments based on mutual trust and a sense of belonging; improving internal and external mobility for a more equitable distribution of resources and to support individual career paths; and promoting meritocracy in the hiring process and in career advancements.
If these are the pillars, three necessary conditions lie at their base: legislators must take a step back and enable a radical simplification of norms; offices of personnel must be adequately trained to design new strategies and introduce innovative systems; public directors have to be ready to take responsibility for the management of their collaborators.