Geringonça brought 16 thousand more government employees

  • ECO News
  • 16 August 2018

DG for Home Affairs and Public Employment released data about the balance of government employees. It has increased to 675 thousand. The current government hired 16 thousand more employees.

By the end of June this year, Portugal had a total of 675,320 government employees, which corresponded to an increase of 904 people and a year on year growth of 7,304 workers.

The data was released by the Síntese Estatística de Emprego Público (SIEP) — a Portuguese statistics monitoring tool for government employment — on Tuesday morning, with numbers showing that this indicator has risen despite the 646 job cuts to the Public Administration, as both Local and Regional Authorities have increased their number of contracts by 1,559 during the second quarter of the year.

Municipalities, city halls and so on: why are they hiring more staff?

Accordingly to SIEP, this has happened because of a measure that meant to regularise the country’s precarious public worker contracts from the Local Administration and also given a rise in hiring for extra staff for seasonal socio-cultural activities, as well as a recruitment of extra fireman by each city council’s fire squad.

In terms of the central administration, there was a fall of 646 vacancies, much a-do with the reduction in the number of teachers (-1,504 were hired).

Another bet for the country’s central administration was the fire vigilantes hired by GNR (Portuguese gendarmerie), to prevent forest fires during the summer.

The total number of government employees (675 thousand) has been going up over the last few quarters of the year. Also, since the beginning of Costa’s administration, there has been an increase of more than 16 thousand.

However, despite the increase, we’re still far from the 728 thousand people milestone from 2011, the year when the troika arrived in Portugal.

How much do government employees earn?

SIEP’s statistics also take a close look at their payroll, concluding that, in April, the average monthly income on a full-time job in the public administration reached €1,468, a variation of 0,1% in comparison to January, accounting to a year on year growth of 0,5%.

This slight growth is justified as being “the effect of the entry and leave of workers with several different compensation levels, given the update of the minimum compensation guarantee and the unfreezing of the career paths in the sector”.

The monthly average does not accurately mirror the amount that government employees are taking home each month: prizes and subsidies, fixed supplementary allowances and extra-working hours, which on average will sum up to €1,709.2 gross monthly earnings for a government employee.