Well, you cannot keep a great gag down and my Spanish lawyer has just sent me a fabulous (short and hilarious!!) video about the state system in Spain. In fact, I featured this video in an article on Culture Spain earlier in the year entitled Bureaucracy in Spain – but I think I am more than justified in highlighting the video again, in case you have not already seen it. It is terrific:
The thing is that every Spaniard that I have met, who has seen the video, finds it very funny – and completely true to life. It pictures the state system in Spain at its worst and shows how appallingly elephantine the civil service in Spain can be.
Certainly, the whole concept of a fixed ‘job for life’ once you have passed your civil service exams in Spain (oposiciones) is ridiculous. All of a sudden, as a civil servant in Spain, you enter the ultimate protected work environment which has little to do, if anything at all, with the private sector and the realities of earning an income under pressure.
Indeed, it is common knowledge that some civil servants in Spain manage to hold down two jobs, their state sector job and a private sector job. The latter, of course, they undertake having finished their less than onerous hours within the state system in Spain.
Perhaps an extreme example is that of teachers in Spain (full time, incidentally) who frequently have no more than 18 teaching hours a week!
18!!!! And that does not include the astonishing holidays they get, including almost three months during the summer…
It hardly needs me to say what most of us know already – namely that most North European or US private sector employees have already worked 18 hours by Tuesday evening during their average working week.
This all rather amusing – in a sense. However, if I was a German (for example) living and working in Germany and being asked to bail out Spain then I would find it somewhat less funny. In fact, quite frankly, I would, under no circumstances, be inclined to help out deeply unproductive Mediterranean countries, of which Spain is one. If I then realized that the country concerned (Spain, in this instance) had negligently created its very own economic crisis (with little, if anything, to do with derivatives etc.) then I would dig my heels in ‘big time’ – to coin a phrase.
Of course, it is fair to say that almost anyone from any country in the world would recognize their own state bureaucracy in the video above. However, Spain’s state system takes some beating and needs a radical overhaul if the country is to be competitive in ferociously hard times. The question is whether the existing state system in Spain could be changed?
Everything is possible – but I shudder to think of the problems faced by any government in Spain that attempted to change the existing system. Anyone who has passed his civil service examination in Spain and has an existing position (for life) within the state system would resist any change to their working conditions as if their very life depended upon it.
There is also the problem that almost all the Spanish workers I have met with state jobs truly believe that they are hard pressed and work really hard. However, their perception of ‘really hard’ bears no relationship to people I know working in the private sector. Indeed, the disconnect is remarkable and means that there is a huge cultural gap to be bridged – one of the most difficult things to achieve if an argument for change is to be persuasive.
I hasten to add that my criticism of the state system in Spain should not be taken to mean that the services supplied by the Spanish state are always poor. That would be misreading me completely. On the whole, I have found the service I have received from state officials to be helpful and certainly, on the medical side, I have generally had superb care from the state health care system in Spain.
The point, however, is that, at its worst, the state system can be terrible, slow and arbitrary and most Spaniards will regale you with stories of how every possible obstacle is placed in the way of getting things done. They will also tell you that there is considerable resistance to change and that the nature of the existing system crushes any work ethic and productivity. All of which must change if Spain is to genuinely take its place alongside the US and North European countries and receive economic help from productive and hard working countries in the EU…
Nick Snelling – Culture Spain
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Nick,
That is indeed a side-splitter – but v.e.r.r.r.r.y scary!
Surely someone in the Spanish body politic is on the case? Is there no faction which sees Brownie Points from ‘The Market’ [Wall St/City/Tokyo] and thus moving Spain towards economic safety in doing something about this? Sarko had big demos in France when he decided to do something about their absurd pension and employment system, and as far as I know, the French closed their eyes and swallowed the medicine?
If there is such a faction, surely the I.M.F. would spring them the trifling cost of running that film at prime time in the ad breaks until the joke wore thin and the point went in …
People in civil services everywhere will tell you they work hard. That’s because they are subject to both Parkinson’s Law and The Peter Principle, as everyone is. But civil servants, most notably Spanish civil servants have, as you say, protected themselves from any worthwhile degree of assessment.
When I was running my boatyard, a bloke from The Min of Ag and Fish rocked up and said,
” I want to inspect your ‘Animals Prohibited From Landing’ sign.”
I pointed out the enormous metal rectangle, spanning the full width of the river frontage of my workshops.
“A bit rusty, isn’t it?”
“Can you read it? Is the cat/dog/parrot/horse ideogram visible? Does it still say ‘Defence d’importer les animaux? ”
“Errr… well, s’pose so..”
“So that’s a tick on you list, is it?”
“Mmmm. S’pose so”.
Then, gloomily,
“I ‘spect this’ll be the last time I come. It’s all changing, Bloody Passports for Pets ‘n stuff…”
And off he trudged, presumably to be a victim of the next purge.
Very good, Chris! Changes are clearly needed and fast but these will be very hard to implement not least because the people implementing any changes will the civil servants themselves and they will acting against their own interests!
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