The Problem of the State Bureaucracy

Abstract

The public would be mistaken to consider the labour dispute among state employees as just one more case of workers voicing their grievances, clamouring for a salary increase and a reduction in working hours. In a manufacturing plant where the work is well organized or where the harmful effects of bad organization make themselves felt solely in the business establishment involved, one can, roughly speaking, afford not to view the matter from a perspective that goes beyond the issue of pay levels and working hours. In the case of state employees, on the other hand, the question cannot be considered in these terms: the work of the bureaucracy is very badly organized, and for this reason, although the wages are low, enormous costs are involved yet the institution’s performance is poor and the taxpayer is burdened with a high rate of taxation to maintain an impoverished, discontented, envious and unproductive class of public servants. Unless the current type of organization is changed, it has to be said that the problem is unsolvable. Furthermore, even if, as the government commission headed by the Undersecretary to the Treasury has suggested, the State were to give an additional 500 or 600 million liras a year to its employees, the taxpayer would have an enormously heavy tax burden, which would perhaps be unbearable if one also takes into account the new charges that would have to be imposed for other reasons, and in any case there would be no let-up in the employees’ grievances.

First published in Corriere della Sera, 20 May 1919.