Stop employing additional people, PM tells government departments

The government has prohibited state departments from employing contracted and volunteer staff because the public services is viewed as being already overloaded with employees and officials.
Addressing a question raised by members of the National Assembly (NA) last week, Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith said it was a unique problem for Laos which saw state departments employing many additional contracted and volunteer staff, despite the limits set by the government’s annual civil servant quota. 
The education sector in particular is known to have employed a number of additional contracted and volunteer teachers to work at government schools, especially in rural communities.
“No countries do what we do,” the premier said in response to one MPs’ suggestion that the government should consider accepting contracted and volunteer staff as civil servants.
“It is impossible to accept all contracted and volunteer staffs as civil servants,” PM Thongloun said.
The education department is given the largest quota of staff than other public services and qualified contracted and volunteer staff should be selected to fulfill this quota, PM Thongloun stated.
“Don’t employ any more extra people,” he said.  
“We cannot allow our organisational structure to swell further. Good governance doesn’t mean just getting more officials in to do all the work.”   
A few qualified officials doing a job efficiently is best, the PM said.
PM Thongloun suggested state departments could organise training for their contracted or volunteer staff to enable them finding work in the private sector.
The government has entrusted local authorities to review the number of civil servants, con-tracted staff and volunteer staff that there are in each Ministry.  Public service staff should be employed on the basis of real need.
The move came as the government attempted to downsize state department organisational structures and reduce civil servant numbers. This was after learning that Laos has employed a larger proportion compared to other countries in the region.
Laos currently employs 184,871 civil servants, representing 2.8 percent of the entire population.
This figure excludes soldiers, police officers, and volunteers and employees of state-owned enterprises.
The 2.8 percent ratio gives Laos the second largest proportion of civil servants among the 10 Asean member countries after Brunei.
These unwarranted employees added a heavy burden to state expenditure. 
The structure of state organisations has expanded in recent years because many departments have grown through an excessive number of officials. Furthermore, many state departments also employ officials on a contract basis.
In light of the issue, PM Thongloun himself last year issued Executive Order No. 3 to streamline and down-size the state organisational structure.  This required  all state departments to merge offices whose scope of work overlapped. 
The government has also reduced the number of new civil servants recruited each year from more than 10,000 people previously to 3,000 last year and to 1,500 people this year.
Officials said the quota cut, which is smaller than the number of workers retiring, will enable the government to reduce the overall number of civil servants.  Almost 4,000 officials retired in 2018.

By Souksakhone Vaenkeo
(Latest Update June 14, 2019)