Government distorts labour market

I was with a notary this week who told me that he had lost two team members to the tax authorities. An accountant accompanying us added that his children, who had studied tax law, had also joined the tax department. And considering the workload compared to what he himself had gone through in his career, he gave them great credit. I wondered aloud how they thought they would build wealth then. ‘They get that from me,’ was his response. In our dealings with tax authorities, we meet more and more former advisers who have made the switch. In my younger years, the movement was the other way round. Young people chose the tax department because of the good study facilities, and after graduation they moved to the corporate world to earn more.

What drives the new generation?
Salary is apparently no longer the deciding factor for a job choice for the current generation of professionals. It is already a matter of course for our organisation that applying starters do not want to work more than 32 hours a week. Preferably a little less. Within my generation, this continues to be met with incomprehension. In our younger years, we were motivated to work on our future and were doing so full-time. Working hard was a prerequisite for success. That this sometimes meant pressure in the evenings or weekends we took for granted. If you made a career and therefore had to represent the organisation externally at all kinds of meetings outside office hours, we thought it was perfectly normal. Taking time off because you had to take your daughter to the airport for a holiday trip really wasn't possible. That is different now.

Employees like to keep the time they want to spend in an office as short as possible. In doing so, employers should allow active monitoring of all whatsapp groups during office hours and the appointment with the heating engineer. When that appointment takes place, we work from home. I am now describing the situation in the corporate sector. In the government, there is a hefty increase. Many more leave days, study leave, parental leave, care leave, you name it. Working from home is the rule rather than the exception. I spoke to a council official while ‘working from home’ on the street with his dog who told me he was going to see his caring mother. ‘Yes, they should just accept that at the office, because I don't get anyone there anyway’.

Waiting pays off
It is illogical to me that, as a professional, you choose an easy job, surely you have an intrinsic need to get a return on your talent, education and experience. But then I am apparently the exception, or so it is explained to me at birthday parties. The government's soft approach towards required effort makes it the winner in today's job market. As a firm, we are hopeless at attracting tax professionals; we cannot compete with the tax authorities. If we can hire young people at all, we train them for the government. When I joined the tax department in 1980, I had to sign a loyalty declaration. That meant that I had to stay employed for at least five years or else I had to repay (part of) the training costs. Now we have to do the reverse.

The good news for business is that the tide is turning. This is due to a number of factors: the worsening economy, increasing efficiency through IT and AI and the realisation by civil servants that they cannot achieve sufficient results, but certainly also the political will to reduce civil service inefficiency. The lack of efficiency gnaws at job satisfaction. You start getting annoyed at some point by the culture and behaviour of your colleagues. However, I would caution against the urge to employ these people soon. That is an almost hopeless venture. Years ago, the tax department encouraged departure of civil servants (imagine that now) and had an arrangement that a departing civil servant could return after 6 months if regrets arose. This scheme was actually used because civil servants could not keep up with the workload in business. I know some among them who are now team leaders and earn more than €100,000 salary a year.

For us, it is mainly waiting for the government's suction on young graduates to disappear. We are getting the first open applications again and that is a sign of things to come. Be patient employers, the market is doing its job.