If there is evidence that the Covid -19 epidemic outbreak brought to light it was the importance of public services and their workers.
We all know that the epidemic outbreak due to the impact it had on public health placed certain sectors such as healthcare workers (doctors, nurses, diagnosis technicians, assistants, administrative assistants, etc.) at the forefront and with greater visibility, but in the meantime it is important to highlight other sectors such as Local Administration, where essential services were maintained with a reflection on public health, such as garbage collection and treatment, or even the important role, in addition to others, of fire-fighters, military personnel, professionals of the security forces and services in support to the populations.
Despite the epidemic outbreak having introduced several changes in our way of life, the truth is that life has not stopped and neither has the Public Administration.
The response capacity of most Public Administration services, achieved most of the time by the dedication and effort of thousands of workers - in a context in which successive governments of right-wing policies have weakened public services such as the National Health Service, reduced the number of workers as in Social Security, changed the nature of the employment relationship, weakened labour relations - is remarkable.
Without losing the perspective that the State as a superstructure is not above class interests, it is not an arbiter, but rather reflects the dominant mode of production, and that it always intervenes in order to ensure the exploitation by capital, the remarkable response given by public services, and by the workers who assure them where the National Health Service stands out, disproved the old and exhausted thesis of the political and economic right of a “Fat State” of “Less State-Better State”, or of a State restricted to functions of sovereignty, representation and security, leaving to the private sector the provision of essential services and functions committed to the State by the Constitution of the Republic, “socialising” the costs and privatising the revenue thus ensuring big profits to the capital.
In fact, one can say that the reality that the situation experienced in recent months has shown was the importance of maintaining and reinforcing the public nature of crucial areas, in order to guarantee quality and universal access to fundamental rights and services.
Without concealing the need to make use of the means of science and technology for the modernisation of Public Administration and greater efficiency and response by the services, the answer given as a whole in this specific time of the epidemic outbreak, has shown that there is no teleworking , or flexible hours (with loss of income) able replace the human relationship, close to the users and the importance and need to have more and better proximity services, for example in healthcare, education, social security, security forces and services, justice, inspection services, public transport and postal service, among many others, the State assuming the fundamental role in their provision, as well as the need to, instead of transferring costs from the central administration to local administration, strengthen it and provide it with financial means to fulfil its role in the exercise of what are its original competences.
We all know that a vast majority of Public Administration workers are women. Women, many of them mothers and that is why it is not difficult to guess the impact of teleworking on the lives of each of these concrete women, with concrete lives.
In the meantime, there remain several and not unimportant issues such as the nature of the employment relationship and working hours, the question also arises as to how the personal data of users of public services are safeguarded in a teleworking framework, in which workers in the concrete conditions in which they work from home, with children or other family members around them, would have to carry out their work and protect user data.
However, we cannot fail to note that, during the most critical period resulting from the epidemic outbreak, in the face of the response of public services in the fight against COVID-19 in defence of public health, opinion makers after a long, harmful and persistent campaign against public services and their workers with the aim of privatising everything that could be profitable for capital, with the State remaining as a mere regulator and funder, today given the evidence of the response capacity of the National Health Service and its professionals besides executing a flip flop on the failure of the State, “elected” the workers as the heroes of the front line.
But the truth is that such praise, pompous and hypocritical, does not hide, nor wipe out the lack of working conditions, does not improve workers' wages, even with the veiled threat, after a meagre 0.3% wage increase in 2020 (after 10 years without salary updates, freezing of career progress) that in view of the economic and financial problems that result from the epidemic outbreak, in the coming years there may be no salary updates. They do not hide, nor do they wipe out, the continuous delay in the regulation and implementation of the health, hardship and risk allowance and the existence of thousands of workers who fill permanent jobs in the Public Administration, who have maintained precarious employment bonds for several years without any prospect of future.
The Programme of Economic and Social Stabilisation, to which the Supplementary Budget gives expression, is proof that the government remains tied to a policy that neither responds to the seriousness of the situation, nor does it lay the foundations for a Portugal with a future, not ensuring the necessary measures to guarantee and ensure a Public Administration equipped with the necessary instruments and means to respond to the problems and challenges that are posed.
It is for this purpose and without prejudice to short-term solutions, with a Public Administration at the Service of the People and the Country on the horizon, that the PCP points out the need for more investment in public services, expanding the proximity services, valuing the workers that provide public services, improving their working conditions and income, valuing their professional careers, ensuring their progression, revoking SIADAP [Evaluation System], putting an end to arbitrariness, and quotas, replacing it with a transparent, equitable and fair evaluation system, replacing abolished careers and functional content, putting an end to the precariousness of thousands of workers who occupy permanent jobs.
Aware that the universality of public services is ensured and guaranteed by a Central Public Administration endowed with the means necessary to pursue the constitutionally established objectives and with motivated workers, the PCP points out the need to revoke the process of transferring costs from the central administration to local administration, advancing within the framework of the Constitution of the Republic with the process of materialising the creation of Administrative Regions as an urgent and irreplaceable process instead of the simulacrum of democratisation of the CCDR [Regional Coordination and Development Committees] and providing the Democratic Local Administration with the means and conditions to comply with their attributions and competences.
