It also claims that a position obtained by competition can be lost if the performance of the public employee is not satisfactory
MADRID, 22 May. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Foundation for Applied Economics Studies (Fedea) has prepared a report on the Public Function Law project in which it highlights the need to increase the level of demand in the selection of public managers, to reinforce their independence and to provide them with better management tools, increasing their ability to reward good staff performance and penalize their lack of performance.
To this end, Fedea is committed to giving administrative units “a certain degree of control” over their own job relationships, allowing them to modify them as long as this does not increase their total labor cost and promoting new performance supplements, “preventing become a minor and quasi-fixed component of salary, as has happened with productivity bonuses”.
The main novelties of this bill that is currently being processed by Congress are related to the professional career of civil servants, the evaluation of their performance and the regime of professional public managers.
According to Fedea, the text of the preliminary draft “contained some important advances”, which “have been filed down” in the draft Law, to which some provisions have been incorporated, in his opinion “very worrying”, for assuming an increase in the “rigidities ” of the Administration and the reduction of “its already limited effectiveness”.
“To a large extent we are facing a final text that seeks to protect” public employees more than the citizens they supposedly serve. As long as this relationship is not reversed, it will be very difficult to move towards an effective administration”, stresses Fedea.
The agency asks to establish “clearly” the principle that unsatisfactory performance may end up leading to the loss of the job.
In this sense, Fedea argues that the bill explicitly links continuity in the job to a satisfactory evaluation, but only for public managers, and opens this possibility “hesitantly for those other positions that have been accessed by contest”.
Thus, Fedea considers it convenient that, in this matter, the wording of the preliminary draft be returned to, since there the reiteration of negative results in the performance evaluation was explicitly linked with the loss of the positions obtained by competition.
Likewise, the Foundation is committed to expanding the scope of this provision to jobs obtained through other procedures and including the loss of consolidated degrees or career sections among the possible effects of repeated negative evaluations.
In order to maximize the probability that the reforms included in the text end up being implemented effectively, Fedea also sees it necessary to assign specific responsibilities for their deployment to directive bodies with sufficient power.
In this sense, he argues that a possible candidate to play this role would be the commission of State secretaries and undersecretaries chaired by the Minister of the Presidency.
“This body should report periodically on the progress of the administration reform before a congressional commission created expressly for the task, which would serve to give the issue greater visibility and underline its importance,” he points out.
Fedea also points out that the Public Function bill also introduces other “very debatable” changes with respect to the original text of the bill.
In his opinion, the most important is the introduction of the requirement of prior negotiation with the unions in the case of some actions that Fedea considers should be the exclusive competence of public representatives or managers, at least with regard to their general design. .
This affects, among other things, the different human resources plans considered in the text as planning instruments in this area, mobility due to service needs and the design of performance evaluation procedures, explains Fedea.
“This requirement, which at least in part leads to the norm what is already a habitual practice that should be abandoned, greatly hinders the management of Public Administrations and tends to reduce their effectiveness and efficiency. It would therefore be advisable to suppress it, eliminating it as much the letter of the law as well as common practice,” he suggests.
At the same time, Fedea claims that the law explicitly states that its main objective is to improve the functioning of public administrations so that they can better serve the interests of citizens “and not the improvement of working conditions or the extension of the rights of the public servants themselves”.
“This would only be a first step, but an essential one, towards a change in culture, without which it will be difficult to move towards the public administration that we need”, the organization assures in this report, which has been prepared by the Covid-19 Mixed Working Group. 19 of Fedea and coordinated by its deputy director, Ángel de la Fuente.
