“We will try to make society see officials with different eyes.”

-Apart from improving salaries, how does the agreement affect the work of public employees in public administration and actors? Above all, how will the citizen benefit?

This is probably the first time this double question has been asked in an employment agreement, because the previous questions have always remained in the first part. I will help you improve working conditions, but you must ensure that this will lead to improved service to citizens. How is this achieved? We started the Legislative Council with the Public Service Law, which includes a novelty that some may think cannot be established as the professional profession was. Even now, when a great official wants a promotion, he may have to go to another ministry or a position that has nothing to do with what he did before. Now you will be able to do it in the same place you are. like? Accredit their results with positive performance evaluations.

– A frequent complaint from council officials was that they were paid less than other communities. Will the new salary supplement be equal to the national average?

—With this agreement we place ourselves in the comfortable average of Spain and give them the right they had in other societies but not here. A career in health and education has already been launched. In the general administration of the Council, this was not done, and this was unfair to our officials. It represents a major advance that will allow us to gain agility and efficiency in management.

—Performance appraisal also affects transfers and promotion.

-Even for personal satisfaction. It is a matter of profession and pride, that when someone says to you “It’s just you guys in charge…”, to be able to reply “No, not me.” I have a certificate that I fulfill my obligations and that I am at a high level of productivity.

– A system will be created to evaluate your work. How can it work?

—We want assurances that the service is actually improved. Performance evaluation assumes that we will motivate a good official with more resources than an effortless official or even a bad official who, being a minority, sullies the image of the majority. This stimulus involves much more than the economy.

How and by whom job performance will be measured was one of the issues that raised the most doubts in unions. How was it solved?

The agreement lasts for five years, but performance evaluation will be applied in the last three years because we wanted to leave two years to agree on the system that will be implemented. Obviously, it must be objective, transparent and motivating. This means that if I have to choose between stick and carrot, I prefer the carrot, but I want the good official to have two rewards: one economic and one social credit. We will rely on digital systems of public administration in which metadata is left defining the nature of the activity. This is one way. Another thing will be the worker’s own self-evaluation, which will have a contrast to his boss’s evaluation. If they don’t match, we have the metadata to verify who made the mistake. This will work for a very high percentage of public sector employees, but there are others that will not because they do tasks such as reporting that require a more complex system that we must agree on.

Another commitment made is to reduce the positions of freely appointed officials (PLD). How are you going to do this?

– What we are proposing, which is in the spirit of the agreement, although it is not included in it, is that Andalusia has an anomaly in the allocation of places: it will either be a PLD or enter into a normal competition. In other independent societies and administrations, there is a third element that is the majority and does not exist here, namely specific competition. An official who has been there a long time, even if it has nothing to do with the desired profile, applies for the position and gets it because he has been there a long time. To avoid this, we want to promote specific competition, in which the uniqueness of the position to be filled is taken into account. For a general counsel or administrative assistant, this doesn’t make sense, but for a service head or manager, you have to ask for qualities, training or experience. As we enhance this specific competition, we will reduce freely appointed positions and balance these three systems.

The signed agreement also restores what is called social work or family assistance for public sector employees, which has been suspended since 2012, such as purchasing glasses. When will they launch?

-Social work is a very important part of this agreement and has been a demand permanently on the table. We have a problem: The state budget law suspended this right for workers in 2012. It remains as it is because it has not been amended, although members of the government have stated that this decision will be rescinded. But since we had no new budgets either this year or the year before or the next, there was no change. We have requested a report from the legal office to restore some lines. When the agreement is finalized, we will have gone from an allocation of €700,000 to €15 million. In addition to the glasses I mentioned, there will be assistance for raising children, and support for people with disabilities. People with a specific problem will be prioritized. We will not pay anyone’s private insurance. That’s not there. We only serve what is not covered by any public service of the Andalusian Council.

— Social peace has been stamped with UGT and CCOO on paper. However, last Sunday, they demonstrated with the White Tide Movement and alongside the leftist opposition against the military junta’s health policy. Are both positions compatible?

– In public administration, justice and the public sector, no agreement has been reached for decades. The last one that we cannot point to is one from 2003 derived from another from 1996. This is the only time in the history of the Council that an agreement has been approved by all the unions that will mobilize 250 million euros. There was great loyalty on the part of the unions, which were very secretive. In the field of public administration, the UGT and CCOO cannot be asked to abandon their political approach. Overall, it was an enriching process for everyone. Now we have five years to achieve this.

– Andalusian President Juanma Moreno personally participated in the agreement. How did you do that?

-definitely. This agreement could not have been signed without the direct and personal participation of the President. The requests that the unions submitted to us were much greater than the content of the agreement, and the capabilities that the (Ministry of) Finance granted us were much less than what was closed. If we do things well, this agreement will be beneficial for public employees and for the Andalusian administration, because productivity should improve. We will create better working conditions, and we will motivate our public servants. We will give them their rightful place. We will try to make society look at them with different eyes and trust them. There was a critical moment last July when we were preparing the financial envelope and this agreement was not suitable because we had a very limited budget. It was only preserved by the president’s participation. He said to me: “This agreement is an Andalusian path in the vein.” Oh, you win, I win, but we can’t do that unless the citizen wins.