Sebastian Streb

Public Employment Regimes in OECD Countries

The term public employment refers to a large and heterogeneous group of employees who are directly or indirectly involved in the production and provision of publicly financed goods and services. This conceptual imprecision has made the term popular in political debates, but it limits its usefulness in analytical and scientific discourses. Thus, before we embark on a study of the functional and institutional differentiation of public employment in particular sectors, this chapter gives a broad, comparative overview of government employment in general. Following an OECD definition, general government employment denotes public employees in all levels of government (central, state, regional, and local), who are working in ministries, agencies, departments, and non-profit organizations that are controlled and mainly financed by public authorities (OECD 2011, p. 102). This definition excludes employees in public corporations, which are legal units mainly owned or controlled by the government, producing goods and services for sale on the market (OECD 2011, p. 102). In conceptual terms, the notion of ‘general government employment’ refers to the ‘core’ of the public workforce. These employees implement the sovereign functions of the state, such as public administration, law enforcement, or education, and enjoy the greatest independence from private sector pressures. For these reasons, it can be assumed that deviations from working conditions in the private sector are particularly pronounced, and structural resistances towards the transferability of New Public Management instruments are the strongest in this particular segment of the public workforce. Hence, if there are persistent differences in country-specific regulations and reform trajectories of public employment regimes, general government employment is the first segment of public employment to examine.

The Analytical Problem

We start the first section by briefly summarizing important research traditions from which we draw insights for our own analysis of public employment regimes. The first subsection situates classifications of public employment regimes within the wider context of welfare regimes, capitalist systems, and public administration regimes. We then discuss existing conceptualizations of public employment regimes and civil service systems.

A Comparison of Public Employment Regimes in Germany, France, Sweden, and the United Kingdom

The overview of quantitative developments and ‘milestone’ events in Chapter 4 has suggested that the general picture of public sector employment is one of rather rigid structures, slow processes, and contradictory trends. This conclusion, however, is the result of limited and incomplete aggregate-level data, which precludes a closer look into the processes themselves. In this chapter, we therefore explore the development of public employment regimes regarding regulations at the national level, which concern all layers of public administration. We trace nationwide changes and adaptations of the public employment regimes in the four countries representative of the different ideal types of public administration. The United Kingdom serves as a reference case in which neo-liberal ideas and New Public Management (NPM) reforms have had the most impact on the organization of public administration. Then we discuss the public employment regimes in Germany, France, and Sweden. These studies are intended to assess the impact of the constitutional structure of the state and the administrative culture on nationwide trends in the organization of public administration regimes, and to outline the framework for the detailed sector studies in the following chapters.

Research Design and Methods

In the introduction and in Chapter 2, we have discussed the shift from the traditional paradigm of the public employee as a civil servant to an emerging paradigm of the public employee as a provider of public services. In this vein, our core research question is: To what extent have European countries preserved a distinct status of public employees? The theoretical perspective outlined in Chapter 2 suggests that the expected variation in reforms of public employment regimes, triggered by cost concerns and New Public Management ideology, is moderated by the institutional and cultural framework on the one hand and mediated by the extent of devolution of the state’s responsibility for normative goods to private service providers on the other hand. An empirical investigation of this general hypothesis requires different types of information.

Energy Regulatory Agencies

From an economic perspective, the network-based energy sector has traditionally been conceived of as a natural monopoly (Cameron 2007, pp. 21ff.). From a political perspective, after the Second World War, most OECD countries developed specific concepts of gas and electricity as public services that are essential for the well-being of society and the economy and thus ‘should be regulated in the public interest in terms of price quality, security and access’ (Genoud and Finger 2004, p. 32). In most Western European countries, these economic and political considerations motivated the exclusion of electricity and gas supply from economic competition. Instead, the distribution of these resources was organized as vertically and horizontally integrated public monopolies. In spite of national differences in the institutional designs of the energy sector — for example, with regard to ownership structures and the scope of monopoly rights (Eberlein 2005, p. 43; McGowan 1996; Cross 1996) — a safe, comprehensive, and stable provision at reasonable prices was supposed to be guaranteed by non-commercial or semi-commercial publicly owned companies and ministerial steering.

Summary and Integrated Comparison of Countries and Sectors

As noted earlier, scholarly debates agree that during the last decades, public administration regimes have undergone substantial change. The question of whether and how these changes have affected public employment is at the core of this study, assuming that public employment in the past was characterized by distinct features historically enshrined in the civil servant status separating this type of employment from private sector employment. It was the ‘Golden Age’ of the modern nation-state, distinguished not only by territorial unity securing the rule of law and the establishment of democratic institutions, but also by willingness to intervene in market dynamics through a welfare state (Hurrelmann et al. 2007; Leibfried et al. 2015). The welfare state generated a substantial expansion of the public sector after the Second World War and established specific functions of public employment. In most OECD countries, the state became the largest employer (OECD 2009). Employment practices in the public sector created internal labour markets, high levels of job security, career progression based on seniority, and initial qualification for the whole range of the large and more heterogeneous public workforce. Moreover, the state aimed at being both a ‘good’ and ‘model’ employer for the private sector by setting high standards of public employment in terms of working conditions, job security, and integrating disadvantaged groups such as women, disabled persons, and migrants (Bach and Kessler 2007; Beaumont 1992).