To fix a lifelong-employment system that some workers take advantage of.

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To fix a lifelong-employment system that some workers take advantage of.

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In the rain on March 29, government officials of the Seoul Metropolitan Government rally to protest against the culling of underperforming public employees. By Shin Dong-yeun

Local governments have recently been wielding their sticks to clear out underperforming public employees. The move started from Ulsan Metropolitan City in January and has spread nationwide, including to the capital.
Today, we will learn how the movement started, what the benefits and disadvantages of public bureaucracy are, and how to improve the bureaucratic system.
In January, the Ulsan Metropolitan Government selected four senior and working level officials whose work attitudes and performances were evaluated as being low and assigned them menial tasks as punishment.
“We selected those who do not have the motivation and ability to serve the public, and those people who are disruptive in the work environment. Public servants are given job security so that they will not face temptation [such as bribes]. It is inappropriate for some to [think] there are no grounds to be fired if one does not work hard,” said Park Maeng-woo, Ulsan City mayor in an interview with JoongAng Ilbo.
A 47-year-old employee at Ulsan City Hall is one of the four selected employees. After losing his desk job at City Hall, he began meeting residents in an area where the city plans to build a park and persuading them to move to another part of town. He gets job assignments from a 37-year-old employee at City Hall, who is of lower rank than him according to the public employee ranking system.
“I got a job at City Hall by passing the entrance examination and have never been punished in 25 years. At first I could not sleep because I felt like a scapegoat,” said the employee. “But I learned a lot from meeting real people for [the last few] months. People want public employees to work hard and serve for the public good. I will do my best.”
He will be re-evaluated next January and based on the results, maybe returned to his job.
In March, the Seoul Metropolitan Government said it would select roughly 270 underperforming employees, or 3 percent of 9,000 rank-and-file employees, before the end of March and send selected candidates to a street team performing simple jobs such as picking up cigarette butts. The city government said this team would be formed twice per year during the regular employee evaluation periods.
Before being assigned to the street team, the candidates will be given two opportunities to join other departments. If no department head will accept them, they can file an appeal. If the appeal is rejected, they will finally be sent to the street team. For six months, they will collect cigarette butts, inspect vehicles discharging excessive fumes and perform other menial tasks.
After this, the city government will re-evaluate the employees, discharging and eventually firing those with low scores.
“The plan is to replace the few employees who are wasting our blood and sweat. We need a system to dismiss them if they refuse to be reformed,” said Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon in his email to 15,000 city employees on March 13.
An increasing number of local governments are following suit, alarming public employees who firmly believed they would not be punished or fired regardless of work performance.
The belief is based on the bureaucratic system that normally guarantees public employees job stability until retirement.
The Jeju special self-governing province said it would merge departments that rank in the bottom 10 percent in regular evaluations or cut the number of employees in those departments. Seoul’s Seocho district office said it would select both senior and rank-and-file employees who scored low in regular employee evaluations in June and July and have them do menial work, such as inspecting illegally parked vehicles.
The Jechoen city government in North Chungcheong province in January abolished all departments of City Hall and created a new organizational system consisting of several teams. The teams are headed by the most capable employees regardless of formal rankings.
Under current laws, public employees are guaranteed tenure in their position until they reach retirement age while being regularly promoted from entry-level positions.
The system was implemented to make sure that public employees maintain political neutrality and concentrate on promoting public interest without distraction, but it backfired, allowing public employees to stagnate.
The bureaucratic system in which each employee is assigned divided responsibility also aggravated negligence among public employees. Although the division of labor in a hierarchical organization could facilitate workflow, it also limits the creativity of individual workers.
An employee in a highly standardized and hierarchical organization is likely to focus on maintaining the system, becoming a passive worker who sticks to regulations and formalities rather than initiating and leading new projects.
For instance, as the March 15 deadline approached for the first batch of underperforming employees to be reassigned, the usual employee hangouts near Seoul City Hall became unusually empty. A barbershop located inside the Seoul City Hall Annex building in Seosomun, central Seoul, was empty and there were few people at a coffee shop inside City Hall. Hardly anyone was late for work; on normal days there would be one or two latecomers in each department, according to city officials. The hallway and smoking rooms remained quiet and empty as well.
About 63 percent of 500 adults nationwide answered that they support local governments’ plans to dismiss idle employees, according to a survey conducted by Real Meter, a research agency, on March 13. Only 16.3 percent disagreed with the plans.
“The existing promotion system, which assigns higher rankings to public employees according to their years of employment and guarantees job stability, should be reformed,” said an official at the Civil Service Commission.
But the public workers’ unions disagreed. The Korean Government Employees’ Union has argued that the dismissal of idle employees scraps the job stability guaranteed by law and shakes the fundamental system of career public employees.
“There is no objective standard to select incompetent employees. The selection will be largely influenced by favoritism,” said Lim Seung-ryong, chairman of the Seoul Metropolitan Government Employees’ Union.
The union has been staging a one-man rally in front of City Hall since March 12.
Many countries, including the United States and Japan, have long worked to establish small and efficient governmental organizations based on competition. The U.S. administration under President Bill Clinton formed the National Performance Review in 1992 and reduced the number of federal government employees by 35,000 by 1998. The U.S. government also adopted management reforms used in the private sector.
The Japanese government conducted a massive organization reform in January 2001 in which 22 departments were shrunk to 12. The government also decided to reduce the number of public employees by 25 percent over 10 years.
New Zealand’s government has reduced the number of public employees and local governments since 1988, and began hiring some public employees on a contract basis.


By Jang Soon-wook, Jang Wook JoongAng Ilbo/ Kim Soe-jung Staff Writer
[soejung@joongang.co.kr]
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