I recently participated in a virtual public administration conference hosted from the South Pacific. I wouldn’t normally be funded to travel to an event like this, so the COVID-safe format was a real advantage for me, and I found the event very interesting. I “met” many likeminded civil servants from all around the world and, especially, the Pacific Islands, some of whom had been attending the annual conference face to face for years.
One thing I noticed very quickly is that, while there was a lot of age and experience in the virtual room, the public servants from one of the participating Pacific Island nations were noticeably older than the average …. like, much older than the average.
Initially I was impressed that these older public servants were so dedicated that they would continue to serve long past typical retirement age, and that the civil service continued to support and encourage older workers to contribute. But, uh, how wrong I was!
I got into a small group discussion with a couple of these older participants and one of them told me that they cannot ever, really, retire. The pension entitlements for the island’s bureaucrats of their generation are so much higher than their current earnings, and so difficult to change that, if they ever did retire, the country would be bankrupt within months.
How insane is that?
They explained that these, much older, public servants are now more or less paid to stay on the payroll, shuffle some papers around, and participate in the occasional local conference. They aren’t given much real work to do, just enough to keep themselves engaged. Every day they save their country money just by staying employed.
I know that some of the old pension schemes are insanely generous by modern standards, but it seems amazing that a whole country’s public sector got itself into such a dire situation. Surely these people deserve to retire after their many years of service, rather than being called to literally die at their desks for the public good. There might be very real concerns about leaving the country penniless, but it also doesn’t seem useful to keep them around, doing trivial work ad infinitum.
