CLS: 5 Percent More Public Sector Jobs Before Vote

The Center for Local Self-Government (CLS) announced on Monday, September 14, that a new wave of hiring is under way across public administration, at both the state and local level. According to the organization’s estimate, the hiring covers city administrations, public enterprises and public utility companies, and employment across those systems could rise by around five percent by mid-October. The estimate comes just weeks before the parliamentary election, called for late October.

The statement is signed by CLS director Nikola Jovanovic, who links the pace of hiring directly to the election calendar.

Given that the parliamentary election has been called for late October, this pace of hiring so close to the vote raises a serious suspicion that it is a politically motivated move, an attempt to influence the electorate by expanding the public sector, Jovanovic said.

CLS does not base its estimate only on the timing of the move. The organization also points to a legal obligation that applies to holders of public office, and ties that provision directly to the current wave of hiring, citing the Law on the Prevention of Corruption, which bars public officials from using state resources for election purposes.

Public resources must not be used for political purposes or to create unequal conditions among participants in the election race. The Law on the Prevention of Corruption bars public officials from using public resources to promote political parties and their campaign activities, Jovanovic said.

Based on these two claims, CLS formulates a concrete demand of the state: that the relevant institutions publicly disclose the scale of public sector hiring ahead of the election and explain every individual increase in staff numbers. The demand, according to the statement, does not target a single ministry or a single local government, but the entire system, from the republic level down to city and municipal administrations and the companies they own.

Warnings like this have traditionally surfaced before every election cycle in Serbian politics, and as a rule they come from civil sector organizations that monitor the work of public administration, not from party actors. What sets the CLS estimate apart from earlier ones is a specific figure, around five percent growth in the number of employees over barely a month, at a moment when the election date is already officially known. As far as we know, no government institution has so far published aggregate data on the pace of public sector hiring during this period, which is the main reason CLS is demanding transparency rather than a belated explanation.

The question the estimate raises is not only a statistical one. If the claim of five percent growth proves accurate once the data become public, a legal question follows: whether this is the routine filling of budgeted positions or hiring that exceeds the usual pace and therefore falls under the ban set out in the Law on the Prevention of Corruption. That assessment, however, is not for CLS to make, but for the authorities to whom the demand has been addressed.

Neither the authorities nor the opposition had officially responded to the CLS claims by the time this article was published. The Ministry of Public Administration and Local Self-Government, to which the request to publish the data would naturally be addressed, has not said whether or when it will respond. It remains open whether the requested data will be published before the parliamentary election in late October, or whether the question will go unanswered until election day itself.