I made the mistake of declaring to my family over lunch that I was very depressed as President Mas has decided to deduct yet another 5% off my wages, this time off the complement paid by the Generalitat (I’m a civil servant on the payroll of the Spanish Government). This unleashed not the sympathy one is entitled to expect from one’s own family but a torrent of criticism against us, civil servants, preceded by the sentence ‘it might not be your case, because you work hard, but…’. I was flabbergasted. I still am, 24 hours later.
Happily, the members of my family are all employed. Some have been knocked hard, however, by the collapse of the market for which they work (real estate) and, logically, complained bitterly than when they had to take harsh paycuts none noticed or bothered. From their point of view, as a civil servant I’m afforded a high rate of protection against unemployment and, so, the least I can do is grin and bear it when the wages go down. The portrait I was offered is of a civil service class of pampered, lazy no-gooders sponging off the unprotected average citizen.
I tried to explain as best as I could that, whereas there’s been indeed much abuse of public money, if you apply general paycuts to all civil servants you demoralise the ones who do have a will to serve the public as best as we can. My view is that surgical interventions are needed and not wholesale amputations. To no avail. On the contrary, I had to agree with the view that in Spain we don’t need so many universities, nor so many Departments of the same speciality; there’s no point, indeed, in forming engineers if they’re going to be employed abroad. And I do know that employment opportunities for philosophers or philologists do not abound.
Used to the mutual commiseration which we, university teachers, exude when comforting each other as our world collapses little by little, it was shocking to see how close the ones who regard us as a luxury are. Yes, maybe this is what we are, but it’s dreadful to see how all kinds of civil servants get lumped together in this highly politicised misreading of what the public university is about. I feel tempted, now and then, to justify the criticism and misbehave like those who give us the bad name. Maybe I’d be better off, seeing how trying to convince even my dear ones that university teachers work hard is not working… Sad, very sad.