Minister outlines how 15,000 civil service sackings will be carried out
Only about 1,000 of the 15,000 civil servants that have to be fired by the end of next year are bureaucrats who have breached the code of conduct, Administrative Reform Minister Antonis Manitakis.
Speaking to Skai TV, Manitakis said that corrupt civil servants would be just one of the pools from which the government will find the public sector workers that will be dismissed as part of the agreement reached with the troika a few days ago.
“We are committed to speeding up the process for these civil servants to face disciplinary panels so the situation can be cleared up as quickly as possible,” Manitakis told the New Files program on Tuesday night.
Manitakis confirmed that 4,000 civil servants would have to go by the end of the year and another 11,000 next year.
“We have set targets for each quarter,” he said.
The minister said that the other pool from which civil servants would be found is public organizations that are closed down or merged.
“We are determined to evaluate structures as quickly as possible so we can decide with the other ministers which organizations are not needed anymore,” he said.
Manitakis said that 50,000 to 70,000 civil servants work at the organizations that are to be evaluated.
The minister also stressed that some 2,000 civil servants had recently been successfully reallocated to different positions via the mobility scheme.
He said that there would be no voluntary redundancy program for civil servants and emphasized that 15,000 new civil servants would be hired to replace the outgoing bureaucrats.
Asked about the role of the troika, Manitakis said Greece’s lenders had both a positive and negative impact.
“There are some positives because they create some fear but their presence also causes some negatives because it gives the impression that all these changes are being imposed by foreigners,” he said. “It is up to us to show that most of what we are doing, we should have done ourselves.”
