Sunday,
November 16, 2008
Minister Renato Brunetta
has Become a Folk Hero, with his Anti-Slacker Campaign
The
ANNOTICO Report
Minister
of Public Functions Renato Brunetta has become a folk
hero in
Brunetta
Oh
Please, Brunetta come to
By
Alessandro Rizzo
From
Associated Press -Foreign
Sunday
November 16 2008
Italians tend to
bristle at such easy categorization but on one thing there
Now, a government
minister has launched an anti-slacker campaign to slay sloth in the
bureaucracy.
"Ferraris,
we can make. Designer clothes, we can produce. Sun, pizza and love, we can
provide a lot of," said minister of public functions Renato Brunetta. "It
Brunetta has become a folk hero in
Low productivity,
he acknowledges, is not exclusively a problem of the public sector, and the
minister is counting on his efforts to nudge private companies into action,
too.
"The public
has woken up," he said, "it has had an
epiphany."
But numbers point
to some persistent dozing among
Labor
productivity in
OECD figures show
labor productivity in
Italians take about
six weeks of vacation a year, compared to a little over three weeks for workers
in the
With competition
from Asia intensifying,
The country is at
zero growth and the prospect of a global recession only makes the outlook
gloomier.
"
Martone credited Brunetta
Brunetta insisted that laziness
was a mere bad habit, not a fixed national trait.
"I don
In the state
bureaucracy, he said, "bad politics and bad unions have created a monster,
a monster of inefficiency."
The laziness
debate has burst from the corridors of power and into newspaper headlines, with
tales that are half-tragic, half-comic.
The
A postal
employee on disability leave reportedly spent part of her recovery vacationing
in Kenya,
saying the sun would help heal her sore back.
And the mayor
of a village in southern
Public employees
here took an average of 20 days off in 2006 for health or other reasons,
according to government estimates. That is in addition to some 30 days of
vacation for many public employees.
Brunetta, a 58-year-old economy
professor and former adviser to Premier Silvio
Berlusconi, is no slacker himself: he says he works about 13 hours a day.
"There is
enormous potential, just waiting to be woken up and brought to light," he
said of his country. "The public administration is the greatest reservoir
for development that
To reduce
absenteeism, the ministry is cutting the bonuses of those who take sick
leave. In certain cases of repeated absences, rigorous doctors
Already, the
campaign is showing signs of success, having brought absenteeism down by
about 44 percent in both August and September this year, compared with the
same months in 2007, according to figures provided by his ministry.
Martone, the labor law professor,
approved of the government
"
"This is a
cultural battle that will require time and must be waged on many fronts,"
he said. "Italians, it seems, are starting to understand that."
Associated Press
Writer Ella Ide contributed to this report
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