Interim workers, an annoyance for Spain

Certainly, after 20 years of service, now they are too many. One of the chronic problems of the Spanish Public Administration is the issue of interim workers. And, as usual, instead of remedies, our administration only offers patches. It is a problem with many facets and edges, some of which are:

– Overrepresentation: the percentage of interim workers has always remained notoriously above the EU recommendations. For various reasons (without ruling out unpredictability and incompetence);

– Economic savings (interim teachers are cheaper than civil servants);

− Maintenance of client networks (a high number of interim workers guarantees to fill the seats of the huge and opaque service commissions and other leave) and

– Labor instability and dependence on political fluctuations to which interim workers are subjected make them a more easily instrumentalizable group than that of the civil servants.

In this sense, governments have been playing for decades with the offer of vacancies (alternating good years with bad years), according to their particular electoral interests.

The unequal treatment to which interim workers are subjected: under the idea of “divide and conquer” and with the aim of maintaining the servitude of customers, the administration has classified interim workers according to stability pacts (for the so-called high quality interim workers) and “positive discriminations” (for those with greater seniority), but interim workers at last, that is, the day they allocate their position, they go home with nothing.

Another obstacle is the amnestic corporativism of many civil servants who, once they have reached their particular interests, forget those who now suffer from the situation they left behind. It is the historical amnesia of those who, from the beginning, do not care about the general interest and chose  to attend exclusively to their particular matters.

Given this institutionalized irresponsibility, almost all trade unions chose the (so Spanish) solution of “coffee for all”, and negotiate with power the improvements and benefits at the expense of the weakest, even if they are a majority.