He Ministry of Finance and Public Function has renounced removing from their job those Public employees that, repeatedly, do not pass a merit evaluation. This section, included in the first version of the preliminary draft of civil service law and that generated controversy among the union organizations, the last draft has been dropped, it intends to bring the Government to the Minister council next week, according to the document to which EL PERIÓDICO, from the Prensa Ibérica group, has had access.
union sources consulted UGT are inclined to support the text. CCOO has held a meeting this Tuesday afternoon to decide his position, although he has not advanced his position, while Csif must also clarify whether or not he supports the text. On the part of the Treasury, they have declined to assess the state of the negotiations.
The ministry led by Maria Jesus Montero has designed a new scheme to update the norm that regulates the processes of selection, organization and promotion in the public function. It incorporates two new supplements to progressively improve the salary of public employees who do not rise in category or change jobs, but accumulate experience and training in it.
It also reduces from three to two the years that the Administration will have at most to remove, resolve oppositions and assign them to the new public employee. A complementary element to the law designed and already approved for the stabilization of temporary workers, since it establishes that a casual worker may not spend more than three years occupying the same position. At this point, the draft also includes that each year’s public employment offer “will include a percentage of no less than thirty percent of the free access positions for internal promotion.”
Periodic performance reviews
The standard incorporates a system of “performance appraisals” to measure the performance of the templates, with the “purpose of improving the productivity of the different units and the quality of public services”, according to the latest draft. Initially, this evaluation scheme contemplated penalties for those workers who “continuously” obtained “negative results”, to the point that they could remove the worker from the position.
However, this fell through in the last stages of the negotiations and, according to the latest draft, the evaluation model is rethought in a positive way. That is to say, good marks in the exams will serve to have more possibilities when it comes to promote, request transfers or obtain better salary supplements, but the specific mention of removing someone from their position is suppressed. This may occur, but it must be processed by the already current disciplinary regime of the Basic Statute of Public Employees.
Even for these elements, the Treasury has ended up lowering the formal weight of the evaluations, in order to attract the centrals. These came to initially baptize the first version as a “manual of human resources”. In this sense, a positive exam goes from being a “necessary requirement” for promotion to being taken “into account”. The deadlines, criteria and evaluation mechanisms will be agreed via “Collective negotiation” between each administration and its most representative unions.
New salary supplements
Currently, an employee of a State administration receives two types of supplements, on top of his base salary. The destination supplement, which adapts part of the payroll to the cost of living in each area, and the specific one, which pays according to the function performed. To these the Government plans to add a third party, baptized as “career plugin”. And a fourth, the “performance supplement”, which replaces the old productivity bonus and will condition part of the public employee’s salary to the result of those periodic evaluations described above.
The amount of the same and how public employees will be reclassified with respect to the current categories will be the subject of a second round of negotiations.
The Treasury plans to take it to the next Council of Ministers
This standard is compromised in the Recovery and Resilience Plan sent to the European Commission, within the framework of receiving European funds. It has already passed the public hearing process and has been seen for the first round in the Council of Ministers. “It’s a good deal. It improves salary conditions and speeds up the call for oppositions ”, sums up the head of the AGE of UGT, Carlos Alvarez.
The Treasury thus faces the last bars of the negotiation with the most representative unions in the general administration of the State (AGE). This Wednesday at five in the afternoon what would be the last meeting is scheduled, according to union sources consulted. And once negotiated with the social agents, it must be sent to Congress, where it could undergo changes with respect to the text described in this article.