A single article caught my eye and started churning around in my head.
It detonated a wriggling accumulation of the very minor questions I'd been tamping down for a long time. To stop these uselessly noisy thoughts from stirring, I'm jotting them down, diary-style, without much structure.
Before the long post, I should note: the issues below are not about civil servants as a group or about any individual civil servant. They're about my personal interpretation of the term "public-service-er" ("gongmu-won"), the gap I feel between that interpretation and reality, and the ironic situation that gap produces - all of which I'm organizing here through the blog.
Here's the article that caught my eye.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/biz.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2021/01/14/2021011402624.html%3foutputType=amp
Moon administration added 90,000 civil servants... surpassed the past 20 years' hires in just 3 years
[Era of excess civil service] Civil-servant headcount rose by 91,602 after the Moon Jae-in administration took office vs. 86,991 added by 2017 after the IMF crisis. Moon administration, an annual average 7x higher than the past 20 years...
biz.chosun.com
Huh? Wait, no? As far as I knew, the Democratic Party pursued small government... What? "Chos*n" newspaper as usual!!! Gotcha? Everything shows up if you just search for it~! Let me remind you I'm a planning consultant in ICT, lol. And I started Googling.
But you know what..
Even before fact-checking I started feeling uncomfortable.
Ridiculous government sites started popping up like digging potatoes. First up, KOSIS... hasn't been updated since 2017.. Knowing the cost of building this site, the people who worked on it, and the ongoing maintenance team... hmm.. https://kosis.kr/statHtml/statHtml.do?orgId=110&tblId=DT_11001N_2013_A013 -> -> OK, maybe my search was bad.. user error??? Found a new link (click image, link to that site)
Data was last updated on May 21, 2021, but the recorded period is 2019.
Figuring I'd landed on the wrong site, I ended up at e-Narajipyo. Still, at least this one is from 2 years ago - it's new-hire info, but still it shows data up to 2019. https://www.index.go.kr/potal/main/EachDtlPageDetail.do?idx_cd=1018
e-Narajipyo indicator lookup detail
www.index.go.kr
Hmm.. what's going on.. is the info not disclosed? Does each ministry gather data individually, so things don't get updated, and discrepancies happen? So I went over to the Public Data Portal.
It doesn't provide comparison charts, but at least here I could view the information. It truly is a portal of the public-data portals... https://www.data.go.kr/data/15060684/fileData.do
Ministry of Personnel Management_National civil-servant HR statistics (current by ministry and grade)_20201231
Material summarizing the current national civil servants in the executive branch by ministry. You can identify the size of general-service, specific-service, and special-service personnel for each ministry.
www.data.go.kr
I think I finally found it... each site seemed to show the same information, but also slightly different... I was bouncing around so much I tried to organize my Google-driven info-search path and its results.
Hmm... each of these public agencies linked me to where the raw data was supposed to be. But... the original source is ambiguous.. And the level of preprocessing? The display varies from site to site... so I think I found the data I wanted, but... is it the raw? Is it the final data? It was a bit hard to trust. The money spent on each of these sites must have been enormous, and the experts involved must have been serious talent... but after years... Isn't the public-data initiative over a decade old? Why is it like this?
Ah... now I'm getting distracted...
While searching for the number of administrative civil servants I got sidetracked.. Back to it... Let me fact-check first whether the number of civil servants has actually grown, as the media says!
Yeah, it's gone up.. Especially last year, jumped a lot.. in administrative roles.. it's up..
That thought, and the issue I'd skipped just before immediately came back. Wait, what? The budget grows with the number of initiatives, the staff grows with the budget year after year, and yet information disclosure is like this? Every year there's a race to push digitization projects... and meanwhile, especially in the provinces, populations are shrinking..
The money spent on each ministry's digital administration is executed in trillions or tens of billions of won every year,but why are public services centered on people working 9-to-6,why are public services so convoluted,and why are those who execute administrative public duties growing in number?
<- This could be the issue, but it's too vague. I can't remember exact figures.. I'll instead attach objective (publicly available) data links.
As I said at the top, I don't think the issues I'm raising are problems of individual civil servants.
And I fully understand that civil-service exams' difficulty and pass rates are getting harder every year. I have zero intention of belittling the job work life of those who got in through such grueling study. What I do question is the usefulness of what those tough exams actually test. The background for that question, though incomplete, is that in my experience, local governments and each ministry either completely renew their digital systems roughly every 2~3 years or spend a nontrivial amount on maintenance each year. And almost the entire process of "performing" that public duty is handled by external vendors selected on contract.
In other words, the "public duty" (actual work) of those we call "civil servants" (especially the admin types) is not actually doing public work, but selecting (very fairly) and managing (very strictly/without favor) the outsourced vendors who do the public work. That definition looks problem-free at first... but a nonsense already starts here. Hmm.. how can someone who doesn't know the field (for reference, civil servants rotate between departments or regions to maintain fairness of public duty - which could also be seen as inadvertently becoming a catch-all responsible party without their own input) put out a fair RFP, select a vendor, and evaluate the results? An incredibly fair and reasonable logic resolves that nonsense here. Namely: outsource the RFP design (so-called consulting), the bid evaluation, and the result evaluation - every last one of them. Then... you start wondering, what exactly are the civil servants doing?
One thing not to misread: there's no shortage of government-building windows lit up into the small hours. I'm not saying civil servants are lazy. I'm wondering what kind of work they're doing. Whether that work truly counts as public duty... or whether it's selecting vendors to stand in for the public duty fairly pick - picking experts to fairly pick them, selecting a managing a stand-in manager to manage them, selecting an evaluating an expert to stand in for the evaluation.. that's what I'm curious about. And if the latter is the case... I can't shake the thought that this is a truly deformed system. And I'm curious whether the people actually performing public duty have ever once questioned their own work.
They are named as those who execute public duty, and yet they don't. They are not "-ers" (individuals) who perform public duty - only those who perform it through a proxy .. the public-duty project approver .. the public-duty proxy selector ..(honestly, what are we supposed to call them?)
There seem to be two types of civil servants. Those who actually perform public duty directly, and those who don't..
Recently there was a major fire. On highways, in dark alleys... everywhere people live, incidents and accidents never stop. Firefighters and police officers who directly perform public duty on those scenes are, ironically, always in short supply, shrinking in number, always in danger, always having it hard. Similarly, the sanitation workers who brighten the dawn - despite working in more harsh environments than almost anyone - aren't "civil servants" at all; most work under subcontractor-of-subcontractor arrangements at minimum wage, in dangerous conditions.
People make tools, and tools make people. People make organizations, and organizations make people.
In the public-duty domain, flawless fairness and transparency are the baseline - and so are its organization and members. This is exactly the point I see as an issue. Because the principle is fairness and transparency, as long as procedure is transparent and fair, it's legal. This very rational-looking frame is dangerous. As you've seen in the news a lot... inside this frame, the organization's interests often get to legally prioritize over the public interest. And inside the organization, in the process of over-achieving (outperforming other organizations) for career mobility, projects pursued without a shred of private financial benefit, and their expansion, become indicators of organizational loyalty - so the budget must not be left over, every year it must increase, and that becomes the organization's achievement. In this fair and transparent system, they don't seem to have the reason or leisure to indulge in fat-cat talk about efficiency or effectiveness of properly executed expenses.
Ironically, I can't shake the feeling that the civil-service organization, created for representative democracy within a democratic state, carries issues as scary as those of socialism. The idea that an organization's efficiency and effectiveness could be different from the citizens' efficiency and effectiveness is chilling - from the state's... country's... government's?... hmm... even this is ambiguous.... I'm reminded of a certain celebrity's line: "I love the organization, not loyal to a person." They love only the organization they belong to. Most civil servants don't want a speck of private surplus income. All they want is a pure wish - to stay in the beloved organization they've painstakingly built, honorably, for as long as possible.
At first I didn't know.
When I first started working in this field years ago, it was a company's revenue stream, yes, but because the money was tax money, I told myself to take pride in it. I honestly designed and proposed things to help those performing the public duty do it better. The CEO was young then, and so was I. I remember one day, on a drive the CEO was personally taking to meet a regional official in some remote location, he said: "These are tax won we all paid - let's not waste them." That memory has stayed with me then and still. The CEO's sincerity was such that even the officials were impressed. But reality was brutal. Over time, the fatigue in the CEO's tone and expression became obvious. Often, his very proactive proposals and passion made projects harder. The company actually made more money, and grew, precisely when we stopped short at the level where there'd be no complaints, an appropriate amount, just showy enough to look nice, "well spent" sort of thing, while keeping management to a minimum. The CEO was just trying to protect his growing kid and growing staff. In the middle of that, an unbearable project was assigned, he refused it, and through other indirect reasons we ended up parting ways with that client.
Then, somehow, about five years later, I returned to the public-sector market. Same as years ago, still unchanged. No - actually, more shocking than I expected. First, project sizes had changed. Projects less than half the scope of what used to be a heavy 200 million KRW now exceeded 500 million KRW. Beyond the ministries above, almost every local government and ministry is running data-related public projects in the tens of billions of KRW, has run them, and plans to run them at even larger scales. And as I mentioned, there are also tens-of-billions-KRW contracts to hire experts to author RFPs for hiring the proxy companies that perform the public duty (... ah, it's long). Even writing it out is hard - let me sketch it..
In private-sector projects, except for parts of the RFI, the project sponsor is involved end-to-end - not just the ISP and ISMP (RFP) authoring, but vendor selection, execution, evaluation, and maintenance. Because it's their own business. They're the project owner, the one accountable - not only for costs and delivery but for the effectiveness of what's built.
What about those who select public-duty proxies? They're paid salaries and retirement benefits from citizens' taxes (and they pay taxes too... I assume)... and they run projects with those taxes. Unlike in business, the project budget they're allocated isn't money earned by their organization, it's a budget that you get in trouble for saving, and that you plan to get more of next year.
They don't personally execute the project (public duty) that budget is spent on, don't personally select, don't personally evaluate, and don't personally manage.
They supervise proxies who select the project contents, supervise experts who write the RFPs, supervise experts who select the winner, supervise the vendor that executes the project, supervise supervisors who supervise that vendor, and supervise experts who evaluate the results. Because they didn't directly engage in this whole process, and a substantial part of the supervision is done by computer systems - which means it has to be fair - they're always excluded from accountability, and that's how the so-called "iron rice bowl" fully does its job.
Looking at the projects they execute and run, the design process, selection, supervision, and evaluation... it sits in a very gray zone that nobody would comfortably call right. You don't even need to check those sites - just visit your own local government's homepage and you can see it. Sites private companies (who spend their own money) would never build, or wouldn't use after building, are being built every year by each ministry at hundreds of millions or even billions of KRW.
The government, in the name of startup support, gives young people or startups about 20 million KRW - at most maybe 50 million - to build a website... compared to them, 500 million KRW for something slightly larger is "cheap." They'll say it's systems and security... but for how many users? Is that system and security infrastructure more than what B2C services with real personal data and real user counts have? Their systems, security, and firewalls are like wearing a multi-million-won Gore-Tex hiking suit to climb the hill behind the house.
And they don't even share the information they so elaborately built, behind all that stout security, across local governments or public agencies. Even on the public-data portal, ministries don't share among themselves. It's absurd enough that private companies sell personal data for money, but these agencies, ministries, and local governments treat data - created with tax money and not even used - as their organization's exclusive property.. ha..
Not even 10,000 people use a public-data portal that cost 1 billion KRW to build, yet everyone builds their own because they don't share. When you finally open up the data... why did you even collect this? How much money did you spend collecting it? And why did you only half-collect it... I'm speechless..
This whole process and its procedures are extremely legal and fair, untouched by any individual's private gain, executed by very objective digital systems for the public good.
What's unfortunate is the actual public-duty-performing vendors (or individuals) earning money, based on that system, for the sake of their own and their family's wellbeing. In a tough climate, organizations that barely won the contract propose all sorts of additional projects for their own survival. Those proposals are very welcome news to civil servants those who select the experts who select / manage / evaluate the vendors that perform public duty. They use them not only to fill up their allocated annual budget but, in pursuit of competitive advantage over other departments and out of pure loyalty to their organization, to craft ever-more-rigorous and objective procedures that grow their budget. Through this process, projects multiply each year, vendors' headcounts expand, and again more contract announcements go out, more people are hired to supervise the vendors. At this point, almost nobody - neither the civil servants selecting the proxies nor the proxies selected - can easily get out of this loop. Because they have families.
The backdrop for self-deception is clear. The system is very logical and fair. It's clearly not illegal. And there's no monetary kickback either. You might say there's no problem, but you'd be wrong. In this process, they get plenty of "compensation." What they (the organization or system) receive is the fact that their organization and their post are sustained for them (these folks called "civil servants" who outsource actual public duty, and outsource even the outsourcing). Their goal isn't growth or individual success. It's the original "iron rice bowl" mindset people have when they prepare for the civil-service exam - not getting fired. And going further, the reason this system or organization is both so rational (for the system, organization, members) and so irrational (for the nation, society, citizens) is that there is nobody who has to take responsibility for these issues. Wow! It's a chillingly sustainable structure, isn't it?
A structure in which society's long-accumulated budget is continuously executed, at ever-larger scale, each year - whose intent was the public good, whose procedures and reviews were legal, in which no one took unfair gain, was very fair and rational. A structure no one can punish and no one can blame. Wow..
So.. what I want to say, or what I'm asking for, is not "you bastards~ you were terrible! How could you!"
It's more like: take it easy. Read the room... don't do it like Brazil, Cuba, or India.. don't slit the belly of the chicken that gives you eggs, even if it's not gold. Glance at the other chickens before eating the chicken meat.
I started this post hoping to come at an article from a media outlet I really don't like and, using my own area of expertise, rip it apart with a fact-check. Instead, it's drifted into a story about - not left, not right, fairly belonging to neither side, and yet consuming more by volume than either - organizations and systems, not individuals.
Remember when there was something about LH? When the public said "how could they do this?!".. I think I heard someone respond: "if you're mad, why didn't you become a civil servant yourself?!" Honestly, someone who isn't a civil servant can't really curse civil servants out. Because unless you're in their shoes, you can't fully understand their situation. And if I were the one receiving that "benefit," I don't think anyone could easily say "I'd never do that." And I also think that, if I were a civil servant with a wife and a daughter, I'd have worked hard to expand more and more projects without suspicion.
But (and thankfully, only in this one sense), I haven't managed to get married yet and don't have kids. Thanks to that, while I wasn't mainstream, I was able to step out of that zone.
Honestly, the individuals inside those organizations are very pure, very diligent, very consistent people.
The issue I want to highlight is the system, the organization - not individuals. Getting into that system or organization is hard, but getting out is harder. Because if you just hold out, for a lifetime, it sustains not only yourself but your whole family - from a seat everyone else looks at with envy. Leaving that or raising an issue... hmm... might be what the phrase "you crazy son of a ~" was invented for. It's insane to do. It'd be on the order of an independence-movement activity. We all say "I'd join the independence movement!" or "admirable" while we're teenagers or watching a drama.. in reality, independence activists were harassed not only by Japanese soldiers but by their own neighbors, and because of it their families and relatives were ruined - literally. In non-war times, as an analogy, if you follow your convictions twice, your precious family could go through hell. That's why I can't blame individuals.
Earning money for the wellbeing of the family you love is, I believe, noble.
Even so..
The reason I'm writing this long post, editing it over a long time, about this legal but uncomfortable structure and situation, and about the people I think of as noble - those who select the public-duty proxies, and the actual executing vendors - is: I won't blame you. Actually, I know all too well that I - far less capable than you - don't have the standing to blame you. I just hope you become aware of what effect the things you participated in purely, are participating in, and plan to participate in are having going forward. So please, at least until the chicks grow up, please satisfy yourselves with eggs, not chickens.
I'm turning forty and still single, and so I could step out.
Still immature. Still no wife, no kids. I couldn't cope with that petty, embarrassing situation with so-called adult composure or relational savvy. I couldn't go on sympathizing with their performance and pride, continuing to enjoy that cushy welfare and work environment. I probably just lack the unyielding-will, steady consistency of the people who pick the proxies that execute public duty.
As I age, reaching forty alone, I often think about my thirties. Maybe it's getting harder than back then to not get used to things I shouldn't get used to.
When I see adults saying "kids these days have no manners" - adults roughly my age or a bit older - my face burns and my heart races. I want to apologize on their behalf.
Unexpectedly turning forty, today's unemployed life - I'm incredibly proud of myself.
There's no unemployment as thrilling as this.
