A look at the Zagreb city administration and just how many needless individuals it employs instead of boldly stepping forward into digitisation, you know, like the rest of the developed world in the 21st century.
Croatia is famous for many things. From the sparkling Adriatic sea to the glorious landscapes, to the food, the warm hospitality of the people to great minds like Nikola Tesla and Slavoljub Penkala. All of these positives make for an excellent impression of a gorgeous country that produces talent across all fields, from Luka Modric and the sporting world to Oliver Dragojevic and the musical one. One other thing it is famous for (or perhaps it is better to say infamous) to those of us who live and work here, is its masochistic love of paper, stamps, and providing job positions to blood suckers who enjoy watching people pointlessly wait in lines.
Let’s look at another European country. It’s a little further north on the map, it’s a bit more rainy, the food can be a bit grim, and it is made up of four constituent countries, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Equally famed for its beauty and talent, from its rolling green hills and wild beaches to William Shakepeare and David Beckham, the United Kingdom is home to one of the most expensive cities in all of Europe, and one of the financial centres of the planet – the City of London.
Zagreb boasts a population of just under one million. London boasts a population of almost nine million, more than the entire population of Croatia, much less its capital. One would imagine London’s city administration operations to be vast and complicated. One might expect this entity to be a machine that employs countless people, all yelling and throwing paper around. Quite on the contrary, unlike that of Zagreb.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 24th of April, 2020, the City of London publishes a workforce report every six months. As Faktograf reports, according to that document, at the end of September last year, 1074 employees were employed in the City Administration in London, with 97 agency workers working for the City Administration.
The Zagreb city administration currently employs around 3,200 civil servants and state employees. One must ask why a city of less than one million residents needs 3000+ city administration employees. What on earth is their purpose? One must also ask why Croatia is continuing to so fiercely resist the process of digitisation. It has to be admitted that the coronavirus crisis we’re currently in the middle of has forced the country into the 21st century, but without the pandemic, very many things would have remained exactly the same.
Waiting in long lines grasping handfulls of documents and photocopies of them, not even being looked at until you show your ID card, being yelled at by poorly trained employees who know they won’t lose their jobs no matter how unacceptably they behave and needing to take entire days off work much to employers’ dismay just for the pleasure of it is the Croatian norm. At least it has been until the anti-epidemic measures came into force. But will it continue to be? Will this unprecedented situation be a desperately needed learning curve?
It will be interesting to see just how much Croatia takes from this pandemic when it is all over. Will the country begin to understand that an EU country should not be operating in such a fashion anymore? More importantly, will city administration employees, tax office employees and others across the vast spectrum of the nation’s administrative, uhljebic culture finally begin to realise that those computers in their offices serve for more than just playing Angry Birds and Solitaire?
Maybe. But probably not.
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