Tenders: minister wants to open another 10 thousand jobs – 07/24/2023 – Market

The Minister of Management and Innovation in Public Services, Esther Dweck, wants to reinforce the round of public tenders in 2023. Three announcements have already been made, which added up to the opening of 8,200 vacancies. The minister wants to open up to 10 thousand more vacancies and tries to anticipate part of the 2024 schedule for this year.

“If the contest is next year, the person can only enter there in 2025, with only two years to go until the end of this term. It’s not right yet, because I haven’t sat down with Simone Tebet [Planejamento]but I try to anticipate a part,” says Dweck.

As was clear from the announcement in June, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is personally concerned about the replacement. Lula called Dweck when she was at the press conference announcing 4,436 new openings to find out why the areas of social policy and the environment were not included.

“He misses it when he asks for things and they tell him they can’t do it because there’s a shortage of people. That’s why he says that the ministries are empty”, she says.

The Ministry of Management wants to change the contests, but has not yet decided whether it will fully support the PL (law project) that deals with the subject being discussed in Congress.

The same goes for the PL of Quotas. The ministry already has its proposals and is evaluating how to take them to parliamentarians. It is certain that quotas will be applied in the contests. This and other topics are in the tender manual, which will be released this week.

“Now that there is going to be a new large wave of competitions, we want the quota law to be applied correctly.”

You have already opened a competition for more than 8,000 vacancies. How many more are already on the radar?
We hope to at least double that number, opening 8,000 to 10,000 more vacancies, except for federal and military universities and institutes, which have a different logic.

I’m trying to speed it up, talking to the Ministry of Planning to try to anticipate a resource that would be from next year to this year, and release more tenders this year to give people time to enter our mandate.

If the contest is next year, the person will only be able to enter there in 2025, with only two years left until the end of that term. It’s still not right, because I haven’t sat down with Minister Simone Tebet, but I’m trying to anticipate a part.

President Lula demanded replacements. He called in the middle of a press conference. How does the president know in detail the lack of personnel? Do you tell him or is he feeling the problem himself?
It’s a mixture of two things. People count. But he misses it when he asks for things and they tell him they can’t do it because there’s a shortage of people. That’s why he says ministries are empty.

He is also concerned about time and usually does the countdown when we get together: three years to go, five months and I don’t know how many days.

How did you find the public machine? Was there really a risk of a staff blackout, as some said?
In some cases, yes. I spent the first three months of the year only receiving ministers complaining about the lack of structure.

In recreating ministries, when we had to divide people, it was very difficult. Missing people. Many ministries do not have a deputy executive secretary. Sometimes it’s the secretary, a director, and nobody else.

The point is that there were two processes: the lack of competition, which in itself reduces the entry of new people, and the Social Security reform, in 2019, which made many people accelerate their retirement.

But we also lost a lot of people to the market — the case of TI. In this area, wages in the public sector are low. You train the person and, in three years, when he has already become a specialist, he goes to the market. Missing a lot of people in support [de TI]. Right now, the people at AGU [Advocacia Geral da União] made an application for this support area and was unable to fill all vacancies. They were scared.

Changes in public policies also affected [as pessoas], especially in the social areas. Human Rights, for example, was turned to another area, totally different, and the specialized people fled there. In the Environment it was the same. People thought: if you can’t face it, it’s better not to be there.

But it wasn’t just a lack of people. I had no money. Many areas were left without a budget.

In my ministry, some areas were more structured. It’s interesting. The Ministry of Economy was so big that some secretariats were operating on their own.

Wasn’t understaffing for everyone?
No. Some areas were more structured. In Gestão, for example, people got used to touching things without saying anything. In the beginning, I got to know things at the last minute. Nobody said anything before. I even joke: “Guys, now we have a minister”. Imagine… Paulo Guedes had about 30 secretaries under him. He couldn’t handle serving everyone with the same attention. The special secretaries looked after.

Many things were maintained by the public servants themselves. I thank them whenever I can.

Do you already have an up-to-date account of the number of servers that will be needed to fully rebuild the framework and how much would it cost?
Today, there are 80,000 fewer people than there were in 2016. It is a loss of more than 10%. We know that we are not going to recompose exactly the quantity that was before. But we don’t have that perfect number because it’s not that easy to measure the effect of digital transformation. The digital government area itself, which works, is too small for the demand it receives. People are not handling the workload. We are expanding this area.

In the previous interview with Folha, the mrs. he stressed that they will not adopt the administrative reform of the previous government. How has this issue progressed?
It will not be a unique proposal. There will be several different initiatives —contests, careers, training, quotas. But we don’t have a set date for the changes.

How is the discussion about the change in tenders public?
We are studying how to expand the number of cities where tenders take place to spread access. Today, they are very concentrated in the capitals. We are still discussing the PL (bill) for public tenders. We have already done an analysis, but we have not closed our position.

We formed a working group, which discussed with many specialists from outside, and will launch this week the contest manual. He will explain what it is to be a public servant. Many people enter public service because they seek stability or a better salary. But we want to attract people who understand that they are going to make a career, be committed to the population, serve the citizen.

This guide will serve as a basis for the ministries that are going to have a public tender to assemble their public notices.

Another thing we did was the analysis of the law of quotas in the public sector for tenders, both to think about the new PL but also to improve the application already in this tender. We created a committee for this. In this manual you will be able to guarantee the application of the quota law.

The balances show that the quota law was not effective in public tenders…
The law is from 2014. After 2016, there was almost no competition. Education was the area that most contested in the period. However, when there is a competition, it is a professorship for a specific subject — and, when it is a vacancy, the quota does not apply.

Now that there is going to be a new large wave of contests, we want the quota law to be applied correctly.

We did the analysis also thinking about the PL and another analysis of how to apply it in universities. It’s not something trivial. Each university that wanted to better apply it had to think of a strategy.

This work was carried out together with the Ministry of Racial Equality, researchers and parliamentarians who have this as their agenda. We will still talk in Congress. But we are going to forward a PL and we would like to approve it by June of next year.

Aren’t you going to take advantage of the PL on the subject that is being processed?
We are discussing with Senator Paulo Paim [PT-RS]. We are trying a dual strategy, both in the House and in the Senate. Send a PL, to have the Executive take the initiative, and he might take the opportunity to make a substitute based on our proposal. But we are looking at the project that is there and still evaluating the strategy.

X-RAY

Esther Dweck, 45
Degree in economics from UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), is a professor at the Institute of Economics at the same institution. She was Federal Budget Secretary at the Ministry of Planning between 2015 and 2016, during the Dilma Rousseff government.