'Lazy' Italians get a government wake-up call

Italy’s notoriously under-productive civil servants are being targeted by a government campaign to improve their work rate.

“Ferraris, we can make. Designer clothes, we can produce. Sun, pizza and love, we can provide a lot of,” said Minister of Public Functions Renato Brunetta. “It’s the public administration that is below par.”

Brunetta has become a folk hero in Italy for his vow to modernise government offices and expel idlers among the 3.6 million public workers.

Low productivity, he acknowledges, is not exclusively a problem of the public sector, and the minister is counting on his efforts to nudge private companies into action, too.

Productivity in Italy lags far behind other industrialised nations, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Figures show labour productivity in Italy grew less than 0.5% between 2001-06, while in the United States, for example, the rate was over 2% in the same period, and in fellow EU country France it was about 1.5%.

Italians take about six weeks' holidays a year, compared to a little over three weeks for workers in the US and two for those in Japan.

“Italy has a very difficult time ahead, so it can’t afford to waste resources anymore,” said Michel Martone, a law professor. “Public spending must go toward efficiency and effectiveness.”

Prof. Martone credited Brunetta’s campaign with helping to wean the country away from a long-standing cynical view that the undeserving go unpunished and hard workers never finish first.

Brunetta insisted that laziness was a mere bad habit, not a fixed national trait.

“I don’t believe Italians are anthropologically slackers,” he said in a recent interview. “Italy is a country of small- and mid-sized companies, of self-employment. It is the country of people who take bold risks every day.”

In the state bureaucracy, he said, “bad politics and bad unions have created a monster, a monster of inefficiency.”

The laziness debate has burst from the corridors of power and into newspaper headlines, with tales that are half-tragic, half-comic.

The newspaper La Stampa reported that a public employee in a small town on the north-western coast, Mallare, clocked in, then went boar hunting. But he got shot in his leg and was found out. A postal employee on disability leave reportedly spent part of her recovery on holiday in Kenya, saying the sun would help heal her sore back.

And the mayor of a village in southern Italy, Banzi, did not come in for work on 166 days – more than five months – over an 18-month period, published reports said.

Italian public employees took an average of 20 days off in 2006 for health or other reasons in addition to some 30 days of holiday for many public employees.

To reduce absenteeism, the ministry is cutting the bonuses of those who take sick leave. In certain cases of repeated absences, rigorous doctors’ notes will be required. Brunetta has also started a survey to reward public workers who do a good job.

Already, the campaign is showing signs of success, having brought absenteeism down by about 44% in both August and September this year, compared with the same months in 2007.