The Government plans to approve a royal decree in the coming days to launch the largest ordinary public employment offer (OPE) in its history with a total of 30,455 positions in the General State Administration, which represents an increase of 8.5% compared to to the 28,055 summoned last year.
Of the total, 9,509 will be through internal promotion, the largest job consolidation operation for civil servants ever launched by the central Administration.
The government will present the proposal to the unions representing the public function this week to try to close an agreement.
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"I never believed that after 20 years working I would still be a temporary employee"
The great challenge of public employees
The pandemic leaves more public workers than ever, but with more precarious jobs
The Executive of Pedro Sánchez wants to take advantage of European funds to modernize the public administration.
The recovery and resilience plan, which includes the reforms and investments committed to with Brussels in exchange for the 140,000 million in aid until 2025, contains a chapter on modernization of Public Administrations in which it explains that, in addition to technological transformation (for what 4.315 million are reserved), a plan is prepared to improve management, streamline processes and strengthen human capital.
At this point he places special emphasis on the need to "reduce the temporary nature of public employment and strengthen capacities by updating public staff."
Reduce the temporary nature of the Administration
The Executive wants, in this way, to continue advancing in the stabilization of public employment, which suffers from high rates of temporary employment, of about 30%, according to the Labor Force Survey (EPA). This is one of the highest precariousness rates in Europe. In addition, public staff are exhausted by the management of the pandemic, depleted and aged due to the adjustments suffered in the previous financial crisis. Then, between 2011 and 2017, it was barely allowed to replace the casualties that occurred in the body of public officials. The result of that adjustment is a workforce with an average age of just over 52 years, almost 10 years older than the rest of the private sector workers. In the coming years a strong increase in pensions in the public sector is expected, 51% will retire before 2029,so the Government has to accelerate to avoid staff shortages in a few years.
The 2021 public job offer will be especially intensive in areas related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, known as STEM activities. "It is not so much about the number of places, but about knowing the professionals we want to select and the talent that is attracted," explain government sources.
2,924 places will be reserved for this type of technical and scientific activities, 37% more than in last year's call, when the offer in these activities was 2,128 jobs.
Most of these are reserved to increase the body of public workers in information and communication technologies (ICT), intensive in computer scientists and systems engineers.
1,330 vacancies will be opened for them, 35% more than the previous year.
Within the chapter of STEM activities, jobs will also be offered for public personnel destined for statistics, engineering, architecture and science-related areas.
More places for science, research and engineering
In addition, just over 1,450 places will be reserved for the Tax Agency in order to advance in updating the tax system. To facilitate the modernization of the Justice, a little less than 1,200 places will be reserved. Just over 1,000 vacancies will also be assigned to reinforce the prison system; and another 2,750 to improve the management of public policies, with job reservations for administrators, State auditors, auditing or management technicians of the State's civil administration. Some 1,375 places are foreseen for labor professions, to fill vacancies in some of the companies or public entities of the State. Finally, it is planned to include 6,950 places for the bodies and security forces of the State (Civil Guard, National Police or the Army).
The public job offer in 2021 will be extraordinary for being the largest in history, but it follows in the wake of the last three years. Since 2018, the Government of Pedro Sánchez has approved 109,718 places, 73% more than those offered in the previous six years by the previous popular Executive of Mariano Rajoy between 2012 and 2017, when he approved 63,394 places, according to data compiled by the Ministry of Tax authorities.
The pandemic has been a shock for public staff.
The administrations have lived months of unusual stress due to the challenge of combating the spread of the virus and the health challenge of its consequences.
The autonomous communities have increased their health staff to reinforce services in hospitals and health centers in the face of the flood of infected;
they have reinforced the personnel of the educational centers to avoid closing the schools from the second wave.
The state administration hired more than 1,000 workers to shore up the State Public Employment Service (SEPE), the body in charge of managing ERTEs, the main aid instrument to avoid a collapse in employment.
Other key areas to address the management of European funds were also strengthened.
Record of public employees
The result is that in Spain there were 2,710,405 public workers last January, according to data published a few weeks ago by the Ministry of Public Function. This is the highest figure in the historical series that has been recorded since 2002, and represents an increase of 112,693 employees compared to a year ago, a growth of 4.15%. But more than 750,000 of these workers are temporary, have a temporary or temporary contract.
There have never been so many public contracts, but not so much precariousness. And that is what the Executive intends to address with the reform to reduce the temporary employment of temporary employees in the public sector to below 8%. For this, extraordinary regularization processes will be approved so that many of the interns can get a fixed place. During the parliamentary processing of this reform, the Minister of Finance, María Jesús Montero, announced last week that interim officials who have been in the position for more than 10 years can access a fixed position.
