[b]Public servants aren’t cut out to be shiny happy people
Jody Corcoran believes public sector employees are averse to the joys of living and seeking to compensate for this loss via money
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HERE is something dysfunctional at the heart of the public sector, a problem so deep-seated as to be unamenable to superficial examination, study, or possibly even treatment.
Reform of the public sector is one thing: it is beyond argument that such reform should take place, and should have taken place long ago. We need sweeping reform to the point that the public sector as we know it should be scrapped, a new template drawn up, with updated principles and ideals, and the whole thing effectively started again from scratch.
That will not happen as it should, because the body politic is part of the public sector and is, therefore, part of the problem, not the solution. There may be piecemeal reform, of course, but that is almost as bad as no reform at all.
In defensive mode, as it now is, the public sector is not given to critical analysis; increasingly, it is given only to a sense of entitlement, thereby reducing, making a mockery in fact, of the whole notion of public service – a noble notion as originally devised and practised for a while.
At one level, the problem is the juggernaut scale of the public sector: more than 300,000 people working to outdated custom and practice, which has made it unfit for purpose. But, at its core, the real problem is the type of person working in the public sector.
Of course, they are decent people in most ways. They are our brothers, sisters, our cousins. But somewhere along the way they have, by and large, mislaid the concept of service to the public who pay their inflated wages.
It has become quite fashionable to exclude those in the frontline – gardai, nurses, teachers – from such criticism. But I would include these people, as well as the faceless civil servants, from the top to the lowest level, with only a few exceptions.
The problem is, or has become, that these people are unhappy in their work, but also, it seems to me, unhappy in their lives. The level of cynicism among public sector workers is quite depressing.
To make matters worse, they do not seem to have, within themselves, the ability to utilise a form of happiness. They believe it is for others to do that for them. They are, in short, inherently dysfunctional people.
It may be that they see virtue in their unhappiness, because they think that discontent is the only way to overcome social ills.
But I suspect they were latently unhappy before they joined the public sector. In a way, it was why they were drawn to it in the first place. They were looking for certainty, security, stability, upon which to anchor their unhappy lives. Indeed, many of those in the public sector are second- and third-generation public sector workers, making all the more profound the deep-seated level of their unhappiness.
When is the last time you met a happy teacher, or a happy garda or even a happy nurse?
I feel they do not exist. I believe that they are, actually, averse to the joy of living.
Initially, when I confront them with this belief, they get angry, and talk about overcrowded A&Es, or underheated classrooms, or walking the beat in the rain.
But after a while their arguments fall away and they have to admit that they are just not happy people.
They have a point, of course, about overcrowding and underheating and all of the rest of it. We in the private sector use these services and we are equally unhappy as to their quality.
Part of the problem is that public and private sector workers, in this State, and in others, though not in all, have been reduced, in effect, to units of measurement.
As such, we are forced into a state of passivity, which then tends to increase our alienation from the State.
Accordingly, at the collective level, the political process needs to be institutionally restructured so that people’s common interests become the principal driving force.
Economic policy must help to establish those fundamental institutions, which make politicians and public bureaucrats responsive to people’s common interests. Were that to happen, I believe, it might finally lead to a possible fulfillment of individual preferences.
But that is, perhaps, too grand a concept for the body politic to grasp, and is, therefore, not the immediate issue.
The issue remains that, fundamentally, workers in the public sector are unhappy people. In that regard, if no other, I feel sorry for them.
The problem, as I now see it, is that public sector workers are seeking to compensate for their unhappiness through an overwhelming desire to cling to monetary advantage.
They achieved this advantage through the discredited benchmarking process, a process which was fuelled by the now-collapsed building boom, the very boom they now blame for the country’s ills.
Happiness research has attracted a deal of interest since the worldwide economic collapse.
Back in the Seventies, the Kingdom of Bhutan, no less, proclaimed that it wanted to maximise Gross National Happiness rather than Gross National Income.
Others, the UK and Australia, for example, are committed to producing national measures of well-being; in September, France’s President Sarkozy sought to get in, too, on this latest fad, this new economic philosophy, as it were.
Happiness, long holidays, mid-term breaks and a sense of well-being are not my yardstick for economic performance, but new yardsticks are being devised, some with merit.
Armed with Nobel prize-winning economists, and other experts, Sarkozy believes happiness should be embraced by the world in a national accounting overhaul.
The Legatum Institute, which promotes political, economic and individual liberty, last week published a table showing Ireland 12th worldwide as, basically, a good place to live: Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway fill four of the top five spots, with Switzerland second.
Trade unionists are increasingly talking about happiness too, seeking that it rank alongside, or even above, a nation’s Gross Domestic Product as an indicator of how well, or not, a country is doing.
When they do, they cite Scandinavian countries in particular.
But one of the major challenges of happiness research is to explain what is called the ‘Easterlin Paradox’, which shows that where real per capita income has dramatically increased, happiness has remained constant.
In happiness research, there are two phenomena. The first is that most changes in life circumstances have a short-lived effect on reported subjective well-being because, basically, people adapt to a new situation.
In the private sector we know about this: we have adapted – those of us, that is, who have not yet lost our jobs; those of us who have long since taken pay cuts, and may again.
Generally speaking, we are happy: relative to where we were a year ago, I would argue that we are happier. We have done our bit, we still have a job, we will do our bit again. The second, closely related, phenomenon, is the change of people’s aspirations due to changes in their life circumstances.
In the context of economics, people rapidly adjust to increases in income. But after about a year, two-thirds or more of the benefits of an increase in income wear off as people increase their income aspirations.
This process has become known as the ‘aspiration treadmill’ and has been used to explain the Easterlin Paradox.
Our public sector workers are still on an aspirational treadmill. The rest of us have had to get off, we have been forced off; and do you know what? We are happy, perhaps all the happier for it.
As far as I am concerned, it may boil down to this: the most fundamental issue is, probably, whether “happiness” should really be the ultimate goal in the workplace, or in life itself.
For workers in the public sector, at the moment, it seems to be the only goal, even though they are not predisposed towards achieving it; perhaps it is so because they are not . . .
But there are other valid goals: religion, for example, which may account for the thousands gathering in Knock yesterday on the word of a psychic, or which may account for those who worshipped a tree trunk somewhere else recently.
In an economic context, however, happiness should not be the ultimate goal: loyalty, responsibility, self-esteem, freedom, personal development, all of these have equal, if not greater validity in my opinion. But they are goals, or qualities, which seem to be sadly lacking in the public sector.
Sunday Independent
Listened to an excellent analysis last week of the propaganda war fought over the last six months of 2009.
Across the 5 major national publications, the Op-ed balance with respect to the default position of the author was 328 anti-union to 44 pro-union. In fact, every single major editorial was handed to a right wing commentator. The letters to the editor balance was even worse. Naturally the Indo was the most extreme in its hostility to the public sector and the the union proposals. The Irish Times was the most balanced.
