The trade unions are skeptical: “It’s a false problem, the survey indicates that at home there are only cases with particular situations”
BELLUNO. The return of civil servants to the office is a false problem. This is the opinion of the trade unions but also the public administrators because, at least in the Belluno area, the workers who still benefit from smart working are very few and almost always linked to particular health or family situations.
“In recent weeks we have carried out a survey in some of the larger municipalities, in the Prefecture and in the ministerial offices”, explains Andrea Fiocco, of the CGIL Public Service, “and it emerged that most of the civil servants have long since returned to headquarters . The impression is that the announcement made by Minister Brunetta is more of a formality. What appears strange is that, precisely in this period, the government and trade unions are contractually defining the issue of smart working and therefore a specific rule would be useless “.
After the last peak of the beginning of 2021, albeit gradual, the return of public workers was therefore noteworthy, above all because the technological equipment was limited: “It is perhaps the main theme of the issue”, Fiocco continues.
«At the beginning there was a total technical lack of preparation for agile work, there were no necessary equipment and security problems were posed in the management of sensitive data, because at home one is not obliged to have an adequate antivirus. Most of the employees have made do with their own means, even if it would not be fair and in the current bargaining we are also talking about this. One of the things that we did not want to discuss, however, is the savings obtained by the public administration thanks to smart working, savings that we had asked to reinvest “.
Yet, during the months of the lockdown, many citizens complained about the lack of services: “The problem is linked to staff shortages much more than smart working,” Fiocco emphasizes.
According to Mario De Boni, of the CISL Public Service: «Smart working is a theme that must be shared between the parties, not established by law. This is in view of a pact with the government. There is a negotiation in progress in which a good willingness has been shown and I believe that it is not useful for anyone to make a leap forward, also because by now most of the workers have returned to the office ».
In small municipalities it is undoubtedly like this: almost all the employees have returned to the office, also because the numbers do not allow large margins, and there is a very careful organization in the phase of access to the public.
Smart working is still quite used in larger administrations, such as in the Municipality of Belluno: “There are still people who work from home, but in a rather balanced way”, explains the mayor, Jacopo Massaro.
«I’m not against it, on the contrary, I believe that smart working has advantages, especially from a perspective of gender equality and reconciliation of times. However, there remains the issue of the difficulty of measuring the quantity and quality of work done outside the office and, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, there was the problem ofwith technological equipment. The pandemic has accelerated a process that has already begun, highlighting its weaknesses ».
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