Civil service time warp - Promises of reform not acceptable

MAYBE it’s because we so fervently want to believe there is commitment to improving how the public and civil services do the business of this country that we prick up our ears when union bosses acknowledge reform has to be part of the response to our difficulties.

Maybe it’s because we want to believe that promises, made in this time of desperation, will be kept unlike those so freely offered to secure benchmarking.

Certainly, we want to believe that the dangerous divisions between public and private sectors might be bridged if we all had improved services. Most certainly we want to believe — and hope — that the potential of the public service might be realised by modernisation.

Then, on a depressingly regular basis, we get a reality check. Too often we are left to wonder how we were almost persuaded that there is any commitment to these much-vaunted and long-awaited reforms.

Yesterday we had a wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee moment when the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) Mr John Buckley published a report on how sick leave is managed in the civil service. It is, almost unbelievably, almost criminally, the first such report since 1986, nearly a quarter of a century ago.

Every business of any consequence reviews these matters on a continual, almost weekly, basis. Not to do so would be flagrant mismanagement. Yet there has been no study of sick leave in the civil service for 23 years. It is this kind of indifference to the financial consequences that causes apoplexy amongst private sector workers and employers. It is impossible to believe public sector union chiefs and very many public sector workers do not recognise this.

But there is more. Mr Buckley tells us that the arrangements on sickness have their origins in the 1970s. The CAG informs us that “the main circular underpinning the current arrangements is over 30 years old”.

Back in 1978 Johnny Giles resigned as Ireland’s soccer team manager, the Fine Gael deputy for Meath West, Damien English, was born and RTÉ’s second television channel was launched. Email was decades away, job sharing was unheard of and mobile phones were still on the drawing board.

Is it really possible that the civil service sick leave arrangements have not evolved since then? Is it really possible that managers were happy to work with arrangements made, in working legislation terms, in prehistory?

It is this kind of snug-in-a-time-warp mockery of us all that has utterly undermined public unions’ prospects of being taken seriously when they talk of reform.

The absolute necessity of reform can be seen in the CAG figures relating to sick leave in the prison service. After reforms were introduced in 2006 there was a 24.4% reduction in sick leave. Though this was a victory for reform it is an indictment too of the previous system which was little more than a buggin’s turn sickness rota to boost overtime earnings.

Just as every cloud has a silver lining this one has too. It offers at the very least a bargaining position that might help preclude the industrial unrest threatened by those seeking “a fairer way”.

The proposal might be: introduce the wage cuts now but start talking about real reform immediately. When every option for reform and improvement has been either implemented or dismissed and if they have led to the required savings immediately open talks to restore pay to their current levels. Settlements based on promises of reform are no longer an option.