Public employment dependent on the Generalitat has grown 70% faster than that of all sectors of the Catalan economy in the last 13 years. In the period from 2010 to 2023, the number of employees linked to the Generalitat, whether they are civil servants, workers in public companies or similar and labor personnel, has increased by 24.9%, while in the same period the increase overall employment in Catalonia does not reach 14.6%.
The period analyzed includes both moments of crisis, such as the one experienced after 2012 derived from the real estate and financial crisis, which caused cuts in the public sector (including personnel), and times of expansion such as the current one. In 2010 there were 226,322 public employees of the Generalitat, and global employees – 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 throughout the community.
And the trend does not seem to be slowing down, according to what was 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 by 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 in the absence of 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, Agència Tributària de Catalunya, Institut Català de la Salut and Servei Català de la Salut) did not experience significant growth, despite there being an increase in the population and, therefore, an increase in the need to provide public services for citizens.” The same sources added that it is "as of 2021 when the Administration of the Generalitat begins to recover the volume necessary to adapt the staff to the needs of the service to citizens, especially with respect to the health and teaching community."
Manel Fages, secretary of public policies of CC.OO., points out that the growth of public employees “has to do with the model of the welfare state”, in such a way that if it expands, the workers of 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 Ministry of the Presidency, “healthcare personnel have increased by 35% since 2021, and teaching staff have increased, progressively, by 22% in the last six years.”
The public sector was not exempt from the cuts 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 the year 2022, administration and service personnel (technical and administrative personnel, child care, juvenile justice, residences for the elderly, teaching support personnel, forestry personnel...) recovered the volume of troops it had in 2010, after suffering a decrease in troops for more than a decade.”
On the other hand, in that period – according to the Generalitat – there were other groups that did not lose troops, such as the Mossos d'Esquadra, penitentiary services, rural agents and firefighters. “These groups have maintained practically identical templates during the period between 2010 and 2020 and it must be noted that, in the last three years, these groups have begun to grow in size.”
