Public employment dependent on the Generalitat has grown 70% faster than that of all sectors of the Catalan economy over the last 13 years. In the period from 2010 to 2023, the number of employees linked to the Generalitat, whether civil servants, workers of public or similar companies and labor personnel, has increased by 24.9%, while during the same period the ‘global increase in employment in Catalonia does not reach 14.6%.
The period analyzed includes both moments of crisis, such as the one experienced from 2012 onwards resulting from the real estate and financial crisis and which caused cuts in the public sector (including staff), as well as periods of expansion such as the current one. In 2010 there were 226,322 public employees of the Generalitat and the global employed – according to the EPA – in the fourth quarter of that year were 3.2 million. In 2023 there were 282,887 workers in the regional public sector and 3.7 million employed in the entire community.
And the trend does not seem to be easing, according to what has been planned in the failed budgets of the Generalitat for 2024. In the accounts that were rejected a couple of weeks ago, the Government planned to increase the payroll of public employees in 2.6% while the economy as a whole is expected to do so by 1.1%. It is not clear how public employment will evolve in the community since there are no budgets.
Sources from the Ministry of the Presidency, on which the public sector of the Generalitat depends, explain that “from 2008 to 2019, the staff of the Administration of the Generalitat (departments, autonomous entities, Tax Agency of Catalonia, Catalan Health Institute and Catalan Health Service) did not experience significant growth, despite the fact that there was an increase in the population and, therefore, an increase in the need for the provision of public services for citizens”. The same sources added that it is “from the year 2021 when the Government of the Generalitat begins to recover the volume needed to adapt the staff to the needs of the service to citizens, especially with regard to the collective healthcare and teaching”.
Manel Fages, Secretary of Public Policy of CC.OO., points out that the growth of public employees “has to do with the welfare state model”, so that if this is expanded, the number of workers the Generalitat, too. Fages recalls that “public services are intensive in employment: firefighters, hospitals, police, the people who manage the minimum vital income (IMV) or the guaranteed income”.
According to the Presidency, “the health staff has increased by 35% since 2021, and the teaching staff has increased, progressively, by 22% during the last six years”.
The public sector was not exempt from the cuts that were suffered during the years of the real estate crisis. In fact, as can be seen in the graph, from 2011 to 2015 there was a cut in the number of employees of 4.5%.
In this sense, the Presidency adds that “during 2022, the administration and services staff (technical and administrative staff, care for children, juvenile justice, residences for the elderly, teaching support staff, forestry staff… ) recovered the volume of cash it had in 2010, after suffering for more than a decade a decrease in cash”.
On the other hand, in this period – according to the Generalitat – there were other groups that did not lose cash, such as the Mossos d’Esquadra, penitentiary services, rural agents and firefighters. “These groups have kept the templates practically identical during the period between 2010 and 2020 and it should be noted that, during the last three years, these groups have started to grow in size”.
