this week

A fair day’s work

All over Europe, civil servants have a reputation for languor. Victor Paul Borg compares the experience of working in the civil service in the UK with its counterpart in Malta

The news of the week was predictable enough: one particular surgeon had been elected for an expenses-paid tour of Germany, USA and Australia on a fact-finding mission, a trip of acquaintance and observation of these countries’ latest medical developments. ‘Why don’t they send us to learn from other secretaries?’ the young one said. Her older colleague chuckled, looked wistfully out of the window at the diminishing light, and then turned back to her book. In the little office of a famous hospital in London, my co-workers could have been a cast from a comedy: a twenty-something, sexy, woman on one side, who was extremely self-absorbed and spoke with a panting squeal of self-importance (and who relayed the instructions that beset me), and a middle-aged blondish on the other, grumpy, haggard, indifferent, who said she devoured five detective novels in a week. Both were secretaries, that breed of workers who are undervalued and underpaid – one day, the older one muttered, ‘It’s even immoral to think about spending one’s lifetime doing this job.’

Short on money, I had returned to the civil service (for two weeks’ survival mission). My role: entering data in a computer, photocopying, yet mostly filing. Before me I had an ambitious year’s backlog of paperwork to file in cabinets that were already bursting, and it was tricky. I used a ruler to wedge the papers down in their respective folders. It was slow, annoying work, and the ridges of skin where my fingernails disappear under the skin were grazed and bleeding from being brushed against sheaths of papers sticking stiff in the crammed cabinets. Every piece of correspondence and every report in the history of every patient was copied twice and filed in two offices, the departmental office and the general medical office. ‘We need more filing space,’ I said.

‘Yes, we’re going to,’ the young one said.

Philosophically, everyone agreed about the urgent necessity of more filing cabinets. The question was when, of course.

‘Do we really need duplicate hard copies considering?’ The information is stored electronically.

No reply. I was not supposed to have an opinion and neither did the secretaries. I was an office hand: I was supposed to do what I am told with my head down. Opinion and initiative were the mark of someone who’s jolly and eccentric, perhaps a little too enthusiastic for his own good. Behind me the secretaries crouched behind their desks languidly, and I went down to the canteen for lunch. The rancid smell of re-used deep-frying oil shrouded the Staff Dining Room. I had tuna steak in butter sauce accompanied by chips, but I could not stomach it: the fish-farmed tuna was overcooked, dry and hard, and the chips were plastic, and all you could taste was the oil that had not been changed for a week.

‘I’ve got a headache,’ the haggard woman said when I returned to the office. ‘Maybe it’s the light in here. I might have to take tomorrow sick.’

All the while the secretaries complained of being overworked. Yes, they pottered all day, but they didn’t rush themselves, they didn’t stay overtime. Nevertheless, it’s a complaint that emanates from every civil service office in every country in Europe; and all over Europe, the civil service is performing way below expectations. Here, in the UK health service, the situation has sunk into desperation: patient lists are out of control, there is an acute shortage of medical staff and bed space, work conditions are claustrophobic. Then there is the greatest problem of all – too much bureaucracy and too much paperwork – that adds a further strain on resources, and in this atmosphere we shouldn’t be so surprised that mistakes are frequent. Patients have to wait so long to be attended to that recently the European Court stated UK citizens have a right to seek treatment in other EU countries, and the UK government has to fork the bill (a perfect example of how the EU protects the rights of Europeans). Workers are grossly underpaid, and every day they have to weather the wrath of annoyed patients; they are aware that the service they are providing is unacceptably mediocre, but where would one lay the blame? Everywhere and nowhere. It’s a structural and institutional obesity.

The problems sound all too common. I could have been writing about the civil service in Malta and saying the same things – to a point. In my humdrum tasks I had to entertain my mind, and so I indulged in the mental exercise of comparing the civil service in Malta with its counterpart in the UK. My overall verdict: I’m not sure if you can get worse than Malta, not in Europe.

Governments’ answer to a problem that seems unwieldy is a scramble towards privatisation. The term and process itself may be a historical blip in the long-term, but for the moment privatisation is the magic wand, or so governments believe. It’s a process that’s in full throttle in every European country, including Malta. Mind you, privatisation could work in some cases, but governments are in a muddle about it. The danger is that governments are resorting to privatisation as an instant and easy fix: it injects a dose of investment that would look good at the next election, but what about the long-term? There’s no one answer; each case has its peculiarities and vagaries.

In the UK – the country that is more economically liberal, on the American model, than its EU partners – privatisation has received very bad press in the past few years after a very visible debacle. The Conservatives had sold off the National Rail Service as a premise for a better service, but last week Railtrack, the company that runs the National Rail Service, admitted that this year’s service was the worse in decades. No salvation here; safety standards have now dipped dangerously. Still, Tony Blair’s government is pressing ahead with the part privatisation of the London Underground and the hospitals. Both are schemes the public is very sceptical upon, and the left uncomfortably ruffled by further privatisation; Blair is gambling.

The assumption of privatisation is that the private sector can do a better job than public sector employees. It’s an admittance of government failure, and a risky assumption. There are cases where the private sector can’t do a better job than the public sector. In certain cases, success or failure can’t be measured according to the margin of profit. There is something sinister in the notion that hospitals might be run to a profit: how can one profit from people’s misery and people’s lives? Think of all the people in South Africa dying from AIDS because they can’t afford treatment and neither can their government. Do we want to live in a world where, afflicted by a terrible disease, your chances of survival are directly proportional to the treatment you could afford? No? But neither do we want to live in a world where you could die in a hospital corridor because there aren’t enough surgeons or beds.

I contemplated all this as I made mental notes of comparison between the civil service in the UK and Malta. Here, everything was computerised, every desk had a computer, every person had an Internet connection, a voicemail, the hospital employed the latest technology – all this would be too much to expect in Malta, where I also worked in the civil service. True, there was an air of quiet panic, which workers were resigned to; in Malta, no one has to despair because you can simply push a crisis aside, will it away. When civil servants botch something up in Malta, it’s a matter of routine, and a culture of perpetration; here, a mistake jars, and a fuss can easily storm up. Here, people were polite and prudent in that English manner of propriety, though they do brush work your way too; their Maltese counterparts are additionally condescending and contemptuous. A common streak, however, is the custom of complaining incessantly, lamenting about everything, faulting everything: If everything is so bad, then why should I make an effort?

As my secretaries discussed the enviable mission-finding tour of their surgeon, the older one told us that once, several years ago, the secretaries did collaborate with their foreign counterparts – with the hospital in Malta. She skimped on details; she couldn’t remember very well, she said. She fell silent, and then after a few minutes… a flash. The collaboration didn’t go very far, she said.

She said, ‘They don’t return calls.’


Victor Paul Borg is a freelance writer based in London and can be contacted at victor@borg.tf. His column appears here weekly.