An exploration of the future public labor market

The Great Exodus, a joint publication of the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations and the employers and workers organizations in the public sector (VSO and SCO) in 2010, shows a substantial outflow of workers in the public sector in the next ten years. These are largely workers who retire, but also employees who leave for other sectors. Furthermore, there will be workforce cutbacks in public administration in the coming years.

Based on a cautious scenario public administration shows a net labor demand surplus in the next years, that focuses in significant degree on higher skilled workers. More than half of employees in public administration is highly educated.

SEO charts the future labor market problems of the public sector, identify what the objectives are that go with them and describes the steps necessary to achieve those objectives. From the wide range of possible measures that are useful to meet the quantitative and qualitative dimension of the future net labor demand for workers in public administration a number of potentially promising directions has been selected.

For nine measures the possible impact is calculated. These calculations are always about the potential of the measure. It should also be emphasized that these are ‘back of the envelope’ calculations that are surrounded by uncertainty. The measures that are calculated refer to increasing the retirement age, reducing the productivity differences between private and public services, shorten the duration of the unemployment law, tax incentives for higher employment, increasing academic success, lower absenteeism, flexible working hours and increasing productivity by investing in human capital and through performance-based payment.