The government contract employee began as early as the civil service system did.
As the political turmoil under the rule of the Nationalist Government in the 1920-30s did not allow for a full enforcement of the civil service system, many government agencies still hired their own staff and officials who did not pass through any civil service examination. Facing the fait accompli, the government promulgated the first ordinance to govern such a kind of personnel in 1944, which laid down the framework for the system.
The current contract staff system was established after the Nationalist’s retreat to Taiwan. Formally, there are two types of contract employees. The first type is called the “senior contract employee,” which is supposed to undertake some scientific, professional or technical jobs; the second type is called the “junior contract employee,” which is supposed to undertake some temporary, fixed-term or seasonal jobs. The two groups now jointly amount to around 27,000 in size accounting for about 7% of the combination of the civil servant and contract employee workforces (Table 1). The senior contract employee is governed under the jurisdiction of the Examination Yuan, but by a low-level legal code separate from the civil servant statutes; the junior contract employee is only governed by the Executive Yuan, the highest executive organ, with some administrative regulations. However, the code and the regulations function quite as a loose and incomplete guideline that imposes low legal binding effects on the personnel management. Hence, these two kinds of contract staff have been being regarded an irregular and “abnormal” manpower.
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These contract employees are characterized by their non-civil-service identity, as they have never passed the civil service examination. They work in the government agencies usually based on a one-year fixed-term renewable contract. In contrast to the career civil servant, they are directly recruited by the user agencies at any time. As the lack of binding effect of the rules and regulations concerned, which in principle require the agencies to recruit the employee through a fair and open selection procedure, different agencies adopt varied procedures some loose, some stringent, depending upon the personnel policy of the agencies (So, 2010). The contract employee is commonly criticized as a source of patronage, by which elected officials place their clients or constituents onto the positions. But this popular impression is not necessarily true as many government agencies have adopted a more standardized and transparent procedure to recruit new contract employees, even the political patronage remains happening (So, 2010).
A more critical point is that despite being employed based on a fixed-term contract, many of them usually serve the agencies for a very long time, up to more than 30 years as a study finds (So, 2010), no longer a short-term position as it is supposed to be. Hence this phenomenon becomes the focus of some critics who consider such a kind of “permanent” contract staff unfavorable to the overall government personnel institution. Hence, government agencies have been under political pressure to cut the contract-based manpower and its size indeed was trimmed down occasionally (see Table 1). The long-term employment of the contract employees is caused by a simple logic that it does not make sense for the public managers to fire experienced workers if their performance is not bad and there are sufficient overheads available for hiring them.
To be sure, one would not consider such a contract-based position as a promising job. There is no any ladder of career advancement for the employee. Once one is employed as a contract staff member, s/he would not be promoted and transferred to any other positions. The salary tends to be fixed without any increment even after the contract renewed. Of course, they are not eligible for most fringe benefits, the pension scheme for civil servants, job security and other legal protections granted to the career civil servant. The salary of the contract employees is usually lower than their civil servant working partners in their comparable position levels. However, it is possible for some senior contract employees with scarce professional knowledge to have a higher salary. Although it is not a promising job, the turnover rate of the workforce is not high. Except for those with professional or special qualifications that can help
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earn a better job in the private market, most contract employees tend to advance their career in the public sector by taking the civil service examination. However, not many of them succeed and those have failed to shift their track for many times tend to find it difficult to secure a better job in the private market where it may not offer a better compensation package and a more secure job. The above supply and demand forces account for why the contract-based employees become the de facto long-term staff.
It is also interesting to note that these two groups of contract employees are neither a career civil servant nor a laborer in the legal sense that the Labor Standards Law does not apply to them, because the contract they enter into with the government is the one of “public law” not “private law.” This arrangement is justified by the point that the tasks these contract employees undertake involve “public” nature, not simply manual works that some government-employed laborers i.e. the Labor Standards Law applies to them do, like driver and cleaner. On the other hand, the tasks of the contract employees are distinguished from those of the civil servants by the former not qualified to perform “act of public authority”, like law enforcement that is reserved for the latter as their counterparts in France and Germany (Ridley, 1996). As a result, the status of these contract employees is so embarrassing that they lie on a grey area between the civil servant and the labor, somewhat like the situation of
“contractuals” one type of non-career staff in the French government (see Bodiguel, 1999).
Table 1: Number of Career Civil Servants and Contract Employees (2000~2008) Career civil servants senior contract employees junior contract employees Year
no. growth % no. growth % no. Growth %
2000 408,515 7,510 24,262
2001 395,523 -3.18 7,339 -2,28% 20,221 -16.6 2002 389,957 -1.41 7,357 0.25 19,438 -3.87 2003 376,128 -3.55 9,414 27.96 17,740 -8.74 2004 368,899 -1.92 9,339 -0.80 17,178 -3.17 2005 337,261 -8.58 9,509 1.82 17,186 0.05 2006 335,274 -0.59 9,916 4.28 17,588 2.34 2007 336,842 0.47 10,283 3.70 17,366 -1.26 2008 338,305 0.43 10,609 3.17 17,370 0.02
Source: the website of the Ministry of Civil Service:
http://www.mocs.gov.tw/index.htm
The formal rationale behind employing the contract staff stems from the
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difficulty to recruit some professional and technical talents through the “rigid” civil service examination. Hence, government agencies are allowed to directly pick up those talents from the market. In fact, another important reason is the downsizing policy of the government that freezes the strength of civil servants (see Table 1).
Hence, the government agencies cannot help seeking alternative sources of manpower.
Even though the jobs between contract employees and civil servants are distinct in a nominal term, in practice the job nature of the two workforces highly overlaps, especially in the frontline positions, with the contract employees significantly sharing the workload of the street-level civil servants. Moreover, as a study finds, some contract employees do carry out tasks with the essence of law enforcement, like checking illegal parking and investigation of illegal doctors (So, 2010). Hence, in whatever sense, these contract employees play a role of “quasi civil servant” rather than simply laborers who are supposed to do some manual works.