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European Democratic Institutions and Administrations pp 81–95Cite as

Impact of the Crisis on Public Sector Employment: A Change of Perspective

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Abstract

The measures put in place to combat the economic crisis were aimed at reducing the total public sector wage bill in the euro zone peripheral countries. The contribution provides an updated interpretation of the rationale behind these measures—suited to solve a balance of payments crisis, rather than a fiscal crisis—which is suitable for the core/periphery structure of the EMU (Economic and Monetary Union of the European Union). The permanent (rather than transitory) nature of these measures calls into question the traditional role of the public sector employment, and their compatibility with the constitutional rights typical of the welfare state.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Baldwin and Giavazzi (2015).

  2. 2.

    Constâncio (2013).

  3. 3.

    Bagnai (2013).

  4. 4.

    OECD (2005).

  5. 5.

    OECD (2008).

  6. 6.

    OECD (2012).

  7. 7.

    OECD (2015).

  8. 8.

    Cour de comptes (2015).

  9. 9.

    Vaughan-Whitehead (2013a).

  10. 10.

    Utrilla de la Hoz (2015).

  11. 11.

    Vaughan-Whitehead (2013b), p. 11.

  12. 12.

    Vaughan-Whitehead (2013b), pp. 12, 14: Table 1.2.

  13. 13.

    Ibid.

  14. 14.

    Bosch (2013) and Berndt (2013).

  15. 15.

    Rato (2013).

  16. 16.

    Gautié (2013), p. 179.

  17. 17.

    Gautié (2013), p. 179; Audier et al. (2015).

  18. 18.

    Interesting to note that, in the literature, the constraints arising from the participation to EMU have long been conceptualized by the use of Italian words (as the case of “vincolo esterno” in place of “external constraint”), similar to what once happened with the music glossary; see Featherstone and Dyson (1996).

  19. 19.

    Franičević and Matković (2013), Anxo (2013) and Grimshaw (2013).

  20. 20.

    Merloni (2011).

  21. 21.

    An example of this unsatisfactory framing is the one provided by Pollitt and Bouckaert (2011).

  22. 22.

    Merloni (2006).

  23. 23.

    Corte dei Conti (2013).

  24. 24.

    Corte dei Conti (2015).

  25. 25.

    Act of Law no. 124/2015 (adopted by the Italian Parliament in the mid-summer of 2015) empowered the Government to enact amendments on all the main aspects of public sector organization, with specific reference to public management; Constitutional Court’s judgement no. 251/2017 stated the constitutional illegitimacy of some aspects of that Act of Law, and forced the government and the parliament to act in line with some procedural requirements that had been bypassed.

  26. 26.

    Bagnai (2013), p. 38, picture no. 16.

  27. 27.

    See the Greek State Council’s Ruling no. 168/2012 (concerning the cutting of wages of civil servants); or—ex multis—the Italian Constitutional Court’s Ruling no. 215/2012 (concerning the wage freezing).

  28. 28.

    See EctHR’s ruling. nn. 62235/12 e 57725/12, Da Conceicao Mateus e Santos Juanuario.

  29. 29.

    “The Italian Constitutional Court declared the supervened unconstitutionality of the provision (contained in the already mentioned Act of Law n. 78/2010), concerning suspension of collective bargaining practices for public employees. This suspension had first been introduced in 2010 for the 2011–2013 period and has then been extended until the end of 2015 through several subsequent amendments. More specifically, the Constitutional Court indicated that the 2015 Finance Act (Act of Law No. 190 of December 23, 2014), by further extending the suspension of collective bargaining practices until the end of 2015 and by excluding the possibility to increase the payment of indemnity for unused leave until 2018, violates Art. 39, paragraph 1 of the Italian Constitution, concerning trade union freedom. The Court has resolved that the violation arises from the repeated renewal of the suspension of collective bargaining practices, which was first adopted as an exceptional economic measure in 2010, originally only for a limited time. Therefore, according to the Court, it is not the suspension per se to be unconstitutional, as already stated in two of its previous rulings (respectively Ruling No. 310/2013 and Ruling No. 125/2014), whereas it is the further extension of this suspension over the years that, by conferring a structural, more definitive, character to the suspension, created a situation of supervened unconstitutionality”, see http://www3.unisi.it/dipec/palomar/italy32_2015.html#2.

  30. 30.

    See the contributions of Civitarese and Gambino, in this book.

  31. 31.

    Ricci (2015).

  32. 32.

    Vaughan-Whitehead (2013b), p. 21.

  33. 33.

    Anxo (2013), p. 564.

  34. 34.

    Vaughan-Whitehead (2013b), p. 37.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Scienze Politiche, Università degli studi di Perugia, Perugia, Italy

    Benedetto Ponti

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  1. Benedetto Ponti
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  1. ANAC-Autorità Nazionale Anticorruzione, Roma, Italy

    Francesco Merloni

  2. University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy

    Alessandra Pioggia

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Ponti, B. (2018). Impact of the Crisis on Public Sector Employment: A Change of Perspective. In: Merloni, F., Pioggia, A. (eds) European Democratic Institutions and Administrations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72493-5_4

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