The journalist's interlocutor in the television report represented all those classic characteristics that we associate with the old profile of personnel in the social welfare system. She is approximately in her mid-sixties, recently retired, and has spent most of her working life, over thirty years, in the aforementioned sector. She joined the recent protest gathering of social welfare workers held in Zagreb. He leaves the impression of a gentle, warm, calm and rational person.
The personal habitus marked by thorough empathy was inscribed in every word she uttered, it could not only be easily recognized, but also felt, even through a medium such as today's television. Rich multi-year experience of working in a sector that has been systematically destroyed and collapsed for decades, combined with an evidently good education and character empathy, without hesitation legitimize the lady in question to offer a comparative perspective of the state of affairs in Croatia regarding what we colloquially call social.
From the series of problems that she listed in detail, and presented them in an argumentative manner and briefly clarified, we single out the one that she herself particularly emphasized. She said that of all the difficulties in work that her colleagues from the department face, and she experienced them herself, the most difficult is the amount of administrative-bureaucratic work that is delivered to them in larger and larger quantities from year to year. She estimates that during the last two or three years of her working experience, at least 80 percent of the work load fell on administration and bureaucracy, which radically transformed the everyday reality of work, to the point of meaninglessness. They simply don't have time to deal with the users of welfare services anymore, which should be, and nominally still is, the core of such work.
It's the same everywhere, whichever sector you look into. Let's say, in the articulation of the recent dissatisfaction of European farmers, one of the fundamental objections was that due to dealing with administrative forms given to them by the terrible EU bureaucracy, they no longer have the strength, they don't have time to deal with the land, livestock and other activities characteristic of their types of work.
We from science and education will say that due to filling out tables and forms, writing project applications and reports, we are no longer engaged in high-quality research and teaching, which defines our work profiles. And so on, and so closer, each sector is symptomatically comparable to the others. Bureaucracy is ruled, controlled, supervised. It implements effective regimes of biopolitics, exercises power in society. It was anticipated by Max Weber. But the bureaucratic-rationalist models of Western societies from the 19th and most of the 20th century seem romantically benign compared to today's administrative technologies of surveillance capitalism in the digital age.
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