Wednesday, May 13, 2020 - 10:22 Mark Viales

The Gibraltar Government’s ‘do more for less’ policy intended to soften an impending global economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic has received backlash from the public sector.

Chief Secretary Darren Grech’s unequivocal comments last month calling for an improvement to civil service efficiency in a post-COVID world had provoked criticism from the community and local Unions.

“The puzzle assembled post COVID-19 will be very different to what we had before,” he said in a government press conference last month. “We will need to get used to doing more for less, yes for less.”

But constructing the jigsaw has come at the cost of morale as the stark words turned into action and subsequent draconian measures infuriated government workers.

IRON FIST

PANORAMA understands that civil servants from numerous departments have complained of a sharp increase in workload as well as unpaid overtime and improvised roles during the month-long lockdown. Shifting rules on working from home, where some become benign while others are inundated with unclear responsibilities, have increased the burden across other departments that are struggling to cope. The public sector is already understaffed and there are rumours that the government does not intend to extend its cohort any time soon.

Consequently certain civil servants feel the government has laid siege on them and used the global pandemic to justify abrupt and excessive ‘penny-pinching’ measures. They believe that the tight grip on the workforce should be relaxed due to the low number of cases in Gibraltar since the Coronavirus outbreak.

Indeed, the government’s recent rigorous testing procedures have detected just over four percent of the population infected after 3390 results, with the number zero safely nestled around more serious statistics. There are no beds taken in the standard or ICU Covid Wards, there are no patients relying on ventilators, and more importantly there are zero deaths. It is comforting data and it has been that way for a while.

An army of civil servants drafted in to man the COVID hotline claim to have sat behind silent phones, despite the supposed shortfall in other departments. A GHA worker tasked with training the civil servants in their new assigned roles and frustrated with the programme told PANORAMA that it was ‘improvised at best’. Furthermore, some GHA staff have even reported experiencing a reduction in workload in some sectors around the hospital since the lockdown strategy came into effect. With the number of cases on the Rock diminishing, those unhappy with the new measures are worried of working under a government that intends to increase its ‘disproportionate demands’.