Resentment growing at Govt staff policy

Press, 14 March 1978, Page 18

Resentment growing at Govt staff policy

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

Feelings of bitterness and resentment are appearing m ♦he Public Senice as the Government’s policy of holding staff levels begins to take effect.

Work has generally improved because of the policy, but morale is beginning to suffer in some sectors as individuals and groups believe themselves to be unfairly penalised in comparison with others. The Government shows no sign of relaxing its policy so that any feelings of bitterness and resentment can be expected to spread and intensify.

Soon after taking office, the Government said that staff levels would be held at the ceiling as at February 28, 1976.

The State Services Commission subsequently used this as an opportunity to increase management efficiency and work performance throughout the Public Service.

It imposed a regimen on all

Government departments of a 1.5 per cent reduction of staff per department a year and allowed no exception. This was intended to provide about 900 positions within the- Public Service available for reallocation to the departments again. Departmental heads would pare back sections which -were overstaffed or whose work had a low priority and staff so freed would be reallocated by the Cabinet committee on State services.

The responsibility for meeting the 1.5 per cent reduction has been placed on departmental heads, who must also apply to the Cabinet committee for staff from the pool so created to fill posts they want filled.

This has the desirable effect of forcing departments to use their manpower more efficiently or to give them to departments which can use them efficiently. But there is a growing feeling within the departments that the system is an inefficient way of ensuring better performance and that

it is being administered inefficiently.

Some staff are beginning to get hard-nosed about increased work for the same pay, particularly w-hen they cannot use that fact to justify a pay increase. Others accused departmental heads of pursuing a vendetta against themselves personally or their particular section. Assertions of favouritism over where staff reductions are made are freely heard in some departments.

There are also assertions that the reductions are being made in key technical or managerial areas, that when a key employee leaves, the department makes a staff reduction simply by allowing his remaining colleagues to do his work as well as their own.

Some departments have been accused of reducing staff in a particular section because their claim to that section is under challenge from another department: if they are going to lose it anyway they might as well reduce its staff.