Speaking with a group of business majors (in Starbucks, heaven forbid) last week, I asked them about their recently concluded internships, and broached the idea of working for government in their next internship. I received sardonic laughter and sour faces.
“Why would you want to work for government?” one of them asked. He said that the point of working for a multinational company in internship was to get international experience and a good foundation for future business start-ups. Why ‘learn’ from a barely efficient organization clogged with operational management problems and low funding?
Another one of those friends of mine grinned as he licked off the froth of a P130 Café Latte from his lips. “Atsaka walang sweldo!” he exclaimed. I agreed, and considered the price of my own single shot espresso.
Truth be told, the prospect of government work or civil service in the Philippines has in recent years been cited as “dismal,” at least according to a report by the Senate Economic Planning Office five years ago.
Salary systems, compensation, and remuneration are not only low, but also irrational: increases are often “across the board”, and are not performance-based. Across the board raises simply mean that a civil service employee rates increase uniformly regardless of rank. Indeed, where public employees may have salaries that are approximately 20 percent higher than their equivalent in the mid-size private companies, government managers and officials receive as much as 70 percent less than equivalent managerial and executive positions in the private sector. These pertain to gross salaries, by the way.
Aside from this, government services remain to be inefficient. The inefficiency in government processes may likely be due to the flaws in compensation as well as glaring performance disincentives; regardless, the public is disappointed with government service because of the tediousness of public transactions, classic issues in bureaucracy, and most importantly, the delay in basic services.
One of my economics professors, familiar with the processes in the Bureau of Internal Revenue, shared that tax returns continue to be filed manually by the bureau, and that the auditing of these tax returns is applied only to a measly 1 percent of all tax returns filed. The reason why such a process has not yet been made electronic is a wonder of common sense.
Which leads to the next problem in civil service: politicization. Karina Constantino-David, former chairperson of the Civil Service Commission, once said that there are “a lot of gems and jewels working in the national and local level.” Most of these gems and jewels, and even ordinary employees, want to be honest in their dealings and wish to speak up against corrupt practices. The problem is that many of the top executives and authority roles in government continue to be held by officials constrained by powerful outside institutions and interests.
During the Arroyo administration, approximately 10,000 of the ‘higher-ups’ in public management were presidential appointees, who bypassed qualification requirements and experience in public service. The Aquino administration fired all political appointees as early as 2010, but the stigma of such a heavily politicized system remains. One need only look at the unfortunate case of former DILG Undersecretary Puno, a presidential appointee who had been linked to illegal gambling syndicates whose payola amounts to the billions of pesos.
It has been more than a month after his death, and the public spotlight has already dimmed, but the example of former Sec. Robredo is what made me ask my business major friends about public service. The papers like to say that during his stint in the private sector, Robredo had merely been an official in an ice cream company.
But Robredo’s time in the private sector had been a crucial forge in the dedication and hours he allotted as mayor and civil servant. His first job had been as a Materials Controller at Carnation Philippines. What is a Materials Controller’s job? He counts the cans of milk, day in, day out, night in, night out, without sleep, and sometimes involving the task of driving the milk truck during the graveyard shift.
This kind of quiet dedication gave Robredo the energy he needed to start the change in his Naga home city as mayor. City hall had been plagued by lethargy and inefficiency, the very problems in compensation and irrational incentive systems that government continues to face.
And yet the simplest thing that Robredo had to do was actually work, putting in more than the required number of hours in the office attending to actual matters for public management. This very basic task is the obligation of every mayor, every public servant; and yet, the feat has yet been unsurpassed by all the other mayors before him.
He won over city hall. He established performance measurement systems. He killed patronage, and developed merit-based incentives in government. Through all this, he was unafraid to terminate people who did not perform, but he gave people chances. He literally reformed civil service in Naga, in that the profession had become noble, appealing, and honorable.
I fully understand why my business major friends prefer to intern, and most probably work at, private multinational corporations. Robredo had the same inclination upon graduation, and when he was with San Miguel. His example after the People Power revolution, however, has so many implications on the widespread social change that can be caused by infusing the public sector with private sector efficiency and management styles.
Civil service reforms need not necessarily be implemented for government service to become effective and efficient. Young people are an integral force in driving the positive reform we want to see, necessary to transform the public sector. It is just that young people need to take the risk, and look at the bigger picture.
