The recent updating of Greece’s bailout memorandum provides for a sweeping restructuring of the civil service, including a plan to rationalise the sytem by transferring thousands of civil servants to state services with greater personnel requirements.
The deadline for the completion of the first phase of civil service transfers is in March.
At the same time, the ministry of administrative restructuring must also replace all secretaries at ministries with new ones, who will be selected with a meritocratic process by June, 2018. The sweeping overhaul includes ministry general secretaries, governors of state services, substitutes, and special sector directors.
The ministry has made a commitment that all current secretaries must be laid off within three months of their replacement.
The ministry also must complete by June the evaluation of civil servants’ performance, which will be conducted exclusively by electronic platform, presumably to ensure transparency.
Past efforts to enforce any type of performance evaluation of civil servants have met with fierce resistance from public sector trade unionists.
Evi Saltou
