Nationwide, men make up only 29 percent of the civil service.
Photo: Dmitry Dukhanin
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Salary Lag Creates Govt. Personnel Drain
In spite of the perceived prestige of government service, the personnel shortage in the central state apparatus exceeds 15 percent, according to a report published yesterday by Rosstat. Although top state jobs pay twice the national average, the government is unable to compete with the private sector on the labor market. As a result, government service has become woman’s work. In the first quarter of 2008, women made up 71 percent of federal officials, 58 percent in Moscow.
According to the state statistics service, at the end of March, the number of government officials had fallen to 33,900, down from 36,700 at the end of last year. That number includes civil service employees in the central offices of the ministries, both houses of the Federal Assembly and the courts. The enforcement agencies (Interior Ministry, FSB, Internal Intelligence Service and so on) were not counted in the data. That category of government service had 825,400 employees at the end of last year.
The last time the total number of state employees at federal and local levels was counted was at the end of 2006. There were more than 1.5 million people employed there at that time. Vladimir Boikov, director of the sociological center of the Russian President’s Academy of State Service, notes that proportionately, that is not a high number, being about 2 percent of the population, compared to 4-4.5 percent in Western Europe. The staffs of the central federal bodies are only 84.2 percent complete, however. In the legislative organs, only 4.1 percent of positions are vacant. In the executive branch, that figure is 16.6 percent, and in the court system it is 22.9 percent. In individual agencies, the situation is worse. Only 61.2 percent of positions in the Ministry of Regional Development are filled, for example. In the Federal Tax Service, 58.8 percent of positions are filled, and the Prosecutor General’s investigative Committee is running on 57.3 percent of staff.
Sergey Smirnov, head of the institute of social policy at the Higher School of Economics State University, comments, “There is an overproduction of lawyers in Russia and their education is extremely weak for work in the executive branch. There is no personnel shortage at the highest level, but there is a tendency toward shortage among lead specialists and a shortage at the level of department heads.” Specialists also note instability caused by continual reorganization and the high demand for former government employees in the private sector, where they are better paid.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of May 28, 2008
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