Life is good if you are a Public Servant in Luxembourg. You earn on average more than €100,000 ($A165,000) a year, your working hours and conditions are strictly regulated with little or no chance you will ever be laid off or made redundant.
No wonder it seems everyone wants to get into the bureaucracy and for anyone that wants to try, the way is wide open.
Luxembourg’s Councils have been luring workers from the private sector for years — and now the trend is proving fatal for some private sector companies already struggling under high material costs and slowing demand.
The latest casualty is the Manuel Cardoso construction company which announced it was filing for bankruptcy after its workers complained about outstanding wages.
Private sector lobby group, the Chambre des Métiers, said companies such as Manuel Cardoso had to work profitably in order to survive and could not match the starting salaries being offered by the public sector.
“There are now more trade industry jobs being created in the public sector than in the private sector,” the lobby group said.
“The public sector has become a major competitor across all trades, poaching workers away from private companies.”
In fact, some 95,000 people work for the Government or in other forms of public administration — one in three of all jobs in the country and almost twice as many as the second biggest employer, financial services.
The ratio of Council jobs per inhabitant is an indication of how huge Luxembourg's public sector is in proportion to its population.
There are more than a dozen municipalities in the country in which there is one Council employee for fewer than every 100 inhabitants.
The Sanem Commune the country’s south-west tops the list for Council staff per number of residents, with one municipal worker for every 44 inhabitants.
No comments:
Post a Comment