Media revelations that 538 of Ireland’s public servants are on career breaks and more than 50 Government employees have been on breaks of five years or longer have prompted some eye rolling and a fair amount of cynicism in some quarters. The subtext to many of the responses was clear: chancers! These supposedly shocking findings about this fairly modest fraction of a considerable workforce emerged in response to parliamentary questions submitted by TD Michael Fitzmaurice.
So, what are these breaks? Civil Service career breaks are periods of unpaid leave, available to public servants with two years’ continuous service behind them. Employees on leave retain civil servant status and remain subject to the relevant disciplinary and service codes. They don’t accumulate “service considered” (the length of career relevant for salary increment purposes, for example).
On returning, they should be offered a position at the same career grade (or, within a year they should be back at the same grade), but they may have to go to a different department, geographical location, or work in a different pattern than previously.
A recent dispute over remote working conditions for civil servants has provoked similar expressions of scepticism. The largest Civil Service union, Fórsa, instructed members to resist efforts to increase the number of days they have to work in the office, after the new Government committed to reviewing the blended working policy framework. Many seem shocked to learn that plenty of civil servants are still at home all but one or two days a week.
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A lot of people seem to be missing the point.
Career breaks are taken for various reasons, but their availability is vital for those taking leave for care-related reasons. Carers leaving employment completely to accommodate caring obligations face serious barriers when they attempt to re-enter the workforce. HR technology is twisting the knife, since job searches increasingly utilise automation and artificial intelligence in processes once carried out by humans.
A 2021 Harvard Business School study found that many programmes automatically screen out applications where candidates have a CV gap of six months or more, and do so on that basis alone. The study – using data from the US, UK and Germany – reports that in those countries “48 per cent of employers filtered middle-skills candidates based on employment gaps of more than six months”.
Given the near impossibility of getting creche places for babies under one here, few primary carers can return to work before their child reaches that milestone without a nanny or enlisting family to step in. If they need longer and can’t avail of career breaks, they risk landing in the career break penalty zone. Similarly, lots of people just want to take a few years off to look after children without being professionally punished for it.
It doesn’t make sense to force people to remain full-time in jobs that they’re not capable of fully committing to, especially at the public’s expense. The gap between care supply and demand is stark, and we should support those willing to bridge it domestically. If anything, such career breaks should be universally available.
And similar arguments can be made for flexible and remote working. Given that most schools begin at 9am and most childcare opens from 8am/8.30am, dropping children off at a reasonable time and arriving in jobs that mandate in-person attendance at that same time is, to say the least, tricky.
It’s almost like the historical policies that govern these routines emerged from a system in which there was always a mammy (or at the very least, a granny) at home to pick up the slack.
One of the few positives associated with Covid is we learned that, for lots of work, it isn’t absolutely necessary for everyone to be in the office every day. This unprecedented health and social care crisis also showed us that those with caring responsibilities bore an uneven share of the brunt.
To try to withdraw some of the flexibility introduced to help them cope as soon as the lights are back on in this office seems cruel. Cutting down on unnecessary commuting is good for the environment, good for mental health, and good for productivity. Good management should be able to steer teams through the challenges.
Empathetic working conditions might be playing a role in ameliorating previous inequalities in a society in which the marriage bar once meant that ejection from the office was a typical wedding present.
In 2022, the Central Statistics Office published an econometric analysis of public-private sector pay. Generally, at the top end of earnings, private sector workers do better than their public sector equivalents. This trend reverses for lower earners, with public sector employees doing better.
Up to above the 70th centile of earnings (compared with the 50th for men), public sector women are out-earning their private sector counterparts, and it’s only in the top 30 per cent that there’s a wage penalty for being public instead of private.
Responding to the career-break figures, Fitzmaurice said: “People are treated differently in the public service.” Not to sound completely naive, but so what? Working well in the public service means contributing to the smooth functioning of the State. We begrudge increases to Civil Service pay, we begrudge the benefits and work culture advantages that allow the public sector to compete for employees with the private sector.
We talk about cutting bloated Government departments, and then we are shocked when a monster storm happens and the public administration necessary to manage it effectively is completely lacking.
As we watch clumsy, ideological chaos unleashed in the US with the new Doge (department of government efficiency), fronted by Elon Musk, pledging to fire 25 per cent of the federal workforce, we should be cautious about rhetoric that seeks to incite panic or portray typical civil servants as indolent desk-dodgers.
Dr Clare Moriarty is a Research Ireland postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin
