Italy turns uncivil on its servants
Some state workers termed 'do-nothings'
By Elisabetta Povoledo Published: MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2006
ROME: When an Italian labor expert suggested in a newspaper column that the government could reduce public spending by firing unproductive civil servants, he hit a raw nerve in the national consciousness.
Writing in Corriere della Sera, the expert, Pietro Ichino, used the word "fannulloni" - "do-nothings," or loafers - to attack lazy public-sector employees. The paper has since been inundated with more than 1,000 e-mail messages from citizens exasperated by Italy's bureaucracy and retorts from labor unions determined to protect employees' rights.
"I was surprised that my provocation struck such a deep chord in public opinion," Ichino said in a phone interview.
The bitter debate sparked by the Aug. 24 column is linked to the complexity and omnipresence of the bureaucracy - 3.4 million of Italy's 58.7 million people are classified as civil servants, from university professors to police offers to administrative and health workers.
Stories are legion about bureaucratic inefficiency, from long lines at public offices to requests for arcane documents needed to open businesses.
According to the World Bank's new "Doing Business" report, an annual assessment of the complexity of doing business around the world, Italy has continued to slide and is now ranked 82, down from 69 last year. This leaves it far behind other European countries and still further behind the United States, which is ranked third, after Singapore and New Zealand. Most of the countries in the euro zone rank in the top 30; France comes in at 35, a significant improvement over last year, when it ranked 47; Spain ranks 39, followed by Portugal at 40. Italy is outranked even by Romania, according to the report, with a ranking of 49, up from 71 last year.
In the construction industry, for example, obtaining the necessary permits takes nearly twice as long in Italy (284 days) as it does on average in the 30 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (149.5).
"Of all the OECD countries, Italy is second-last, only ahead of Greece, in terms of the amount of red tape and the complexity of its bureaucracy when it comes to doing business," said Caralee McLiesh, program manager for Doing Business.
That may be one reason why Ichino's proposal to trim Italy's bureaucracy was well received. A recent poll published by Corriere della Sera indicated that 71 percent of respondents agreed with the labor expert. Consensus was especially high among young people, people with university degrees and people living in the wealthy northeast.
Even the government weighed in. Speaking at a public debate, Prime Minister Romano Prodi conceded that tighter control was necessary, though he added that any workers accused of being unproductive would always have the right to defend themselves.
Ichino maintains that any real change is unlikely because of labor laws that make it very difficult to fire civil servants.
But union leaders argue that the situation has changed radically since the early 1990s, with "highs and lows," and that efficiency has become a factor in contract negotiations.
"The aim of a private company is to produce wealth, whereas often the aim of public administration is to produce consensus and that implies a political organization and a different logic," said Paolo Pirano, secretary for the public administration sector of the Uil trade union. "Our aim is to introduce efficiency and free the public sector from direct political control."
Civil servants caught in the crossfire tend to blame the system, rather thanunproductive colleagues.
In a letter to Corriere della Sera, Public Administration Minister Luigi Nicolais conceded that administrative inefficiency was a "real problem," and said it was traceable, in part, to a time in Italian history when politicians used local administrations as a makeshift measure to reduce unemployment, especially in the south.
The rule, according to Nicolais, became "little work for little money."
Although reforms over the past 15 years have much improved the situation, he said, the Italian public administration still needs to be modernized, a process his ministry is working to speed up.
According to the Web site moduli.it, which provides guidelines on obtaining documents, 32 million certificates were issued in 2000, down from more than 70 million in 1996. Many documents - certifying birth, residence, citizenship and so on - have now been replaced by a single document, a personal attestation that has legal value. And with the advent of the Internet, many forms have been put online.
To help business start-ups, municipal administrations have established one- stop bureaucracy counters to deal with requests for documentation that used to require stops at several offices. But not all are operative, meaning that in many cities cutting through the red tape is still cumbersome.
"The good thing about having a one- stop counter is that now you only have to go to one door instead of five," said Lauro Davoli, a business consultant in a town near Mantua. But he said that the process was still the same, and that behind the one door was a phalanx of civil servants. "Laws may change, but the people don't," he said, "and they're still working at their own, leisurely pace."
Writing in Corriere della Sera, the expert, Pietro Ichino, used the word "fannulloni" - "do-nothings," or loafers - to attack lazy public-sector employees. The paper has since been inundated with more than 1,000 e-mail messages from citizens exasperated by Italy's bureaucracy and retorts from labor unions determined to protect employees' rights.
"I was surprised that my provocation struck such a deep chord in public opinion," Ichino said in a phone interview.
The bitter debate sparked by the Aug. 24 column is linked to the complexity and omnipresence of the bureaucracy - 3.4 million of Italy's 58.7 million people are classified as civil servants, from university professors to police offers to administrative and health workers.
Stories are legion about bureaucratic inefficiency, from long lines at public offices to requests for arcane documents needed to open businesses.
According to the World Bank's new "Doing Business" report, an annual assessment of the complexity of doing business around the world, Italy has continued to slide and is now ranked 82, down from 69 last year. This leaves it far behind other European countries and still further behind the United States, which is ranked third, after Singapore and New Zealand. Most of the countries in the euro zone rank in the top 30; France comes in at 35, a significant improvement over last year, when it ranked 47; Spain ranks 39, followed by Portugal at 40. Italy is outranked even by Romania, according to the report, with a ranking of 49, up from 71 last year.
In the construction industry, for example, obtaining the necessary permits takes nearly twice as long in Italy (284 days) as it does on average in the 30 countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (149.5).
"Of all the OECD countries, Italy is second-last, only ahead of Greece, in terms of the amount of red tape and the complexity of its bureaucracy when it comes to doing business," said Caralee McLiesh, program manager for Doing Business.
That may be one reason why Ichino's proposal to trim Italy's bureaucracy was well received. A recent poll published by Corriere della Sera indicated that 71 percent of respondents agreed with the labor expert. Consensus was especially high among young people, people with university degrees and people living in the wealthy northeast.
Even the government weighed in. Speaking at a public debate, Prime Minister Romano Prodi conceded that tighter control was necessary, though he added that any workers accused of being unproductive would always have the right to defend themselves.
Ichino maintains that any real change is unlikely because of labor laws that make it very difficult to fire civil servants.
But union leaders argue that the situation has changed radically since the early 1990s, with "highs and lows," and that efficiency has become a factor in contract negotiations.
"The aim of a private company is to produce wealth, whereas often the aim of public administration is to produce consensus and that implies a political organization and a different logic," said Paolo Pirano, secretary for the public administration sector of the Uil trade union. "Our aim is to introduce efficiency and free the public sector from direct political control."
Civil servants caught in the crossfire tend to blame the system, rather thanunproductive colleagues.
In a letter to Corriere della Sera, Public Administration Minister Luigi Nicolais conceded that administrative inefficiency was a "real problem," and said it was traceable, in part, to a time in Italian history when politicians used local administrations as a makeshift measure to reduce unemployment, especially in the south.
The rule, according to Nicolais, became "little work for little money."
Although reforms over the past 15 years have much improved the situation, he said, the Italian public administration still needs to be modernized, a process his ministry is working to speed up.
According to the Web site moduli.it, which provides guidelines on obtaining documents, 32 million certificates were issued in 2000, down from more than 70 million in 1996. Many documents - certifying birth, residence, citizenship and so on - have now been replaced by a single document, a personal attestation that has legal value. And with the advent of the Internet, many forms have been put online.
To help business start-ups, municipal administrations have established one- stop bureaucracy counters to deal with requests for documentation that used to require stops at several offices. But not all are operative, meaning that in many cities cutting through the red tape is still cumbersome.
"The good thing about having a one- stop counter is that now you only have to go to one door instead of five," said Lauro Davoli, a business consultant in a town near Mantua. But he said that the process was still the same, and that behind the one door was a phalanx of civil servants. "Laws may change, but the people don't," he said, "and they're still working at their own, leisurely pace."
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