If you have a son or daughter in college or studying any line of professional training, I imagine you will be deeply concerned about their future. I understand that on many occasions you will have spoken with him or her to address the professional opportunities offered by the market with the aim of trying, as far as possible, to start a decent life project; You understand what I mean, with a decent salary, stability and possibilities for progress. It has happened to me, and it happens to me, and I cannot avoid that, at times, my thoughts are directed to offering advice that I never heard when I was young from my parents nor did I ask myself at the time: “become a civil servant “. And every time I say it I feel like I’m betraying myself, because I’m still one of those who believe that ambitious professional development is possible in private companies; I think so.
But it happens that one, who is very observant, has confirmed that all those friends who have worked for the administration, whether in the City Council, the Generalitat or the public university, have had, in general, a better life, in the sense labor and salary expression, than those who have navigated the private company. It is not that they have earned more or less money, in this matter things go by stages and jobs, although in recent years administration salaries are usually better even in the lowest positions on the scale. But the guarantee of formidable stability in addition to more appropriate schedules to reconcile family life is corroborated. It also happens that the majority of civil servants have already embraced early retirement at our ages at much younger ages than those who continue working under company contracts, with exceptions.
I also want to mention in this reflection the friends who have tried to develop, as freelancers, ideas to make a living; And here I do tell you that as a rule the sacrifice is enormous. Added to the difficulties of setting up any type of business, with a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, is the hefty tax burden and the few compensations compared to any employee. I always remember my father, he was self-employed all his life and he had a shitty pension. Being self-employed in Spain is almost an act of heroism, and I know several who, exhausted from the effort, took a breath and decided to try to get a civil servant position in any administration or public company. It is amazing how difficult this country makes private initiative and how, in the end, many are pushed to throw in the towel to reorient their efforts towards public service.
For this reason, when the time arises to give advice, whether to my children or the children of others, which I hate, I debate between vocation and reality, between encouraging taking a risky leap trying to gain weight in the private world. or spend a few years preparing for an opposition with the possibility of winning it and, in practical terms, having life resolved. It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to defend the first option, observing the salaries that are being paid to young people (and older people) in the private market and how year after year they maintain the same situation or worsen with dramatic situations, like those friends who have been fired at fifty or a few years older.
Then the “experts”, many of whom are usually academics and researchers, complain that this is a country where everyone wants to be a civil servant. And I wonder what advice they will give their children when the time comes to guide them toward the future.
