Less Work For The Same Pay

Less Work For The Same Pay

Just When You Think It Can’t Get Any Crazier

23 January 2026

Another one of those news items you first leave aside, because you simply cannot believe it. Yet it was right there in the media: civil servants in Curaçao want to follow the global trend of working less for the same pay (Curaçao.nu, 2026).

This is in a context where citizens have, for years, received little value for their tax money. Where basic public services routinely fail, and the government obstructs more than it helps.

And where civil servants are nevertheless pampered with one bonus after another: an extra payment in December, the bashi bonus in January. Always new allowances, while performance and productivity show no demonstrable improvement.

Are you out of your mind to demand fewer working hours for the same pay in such a reality?

The very fact that this is even being proposed is a certificate of incompetence and a total lack of self-reflection.

This is explicitly not about every individual civil servant — many do their jobs conscientiously — but about a system that structurally rewards failure.

Politicians pamper civil servants not because they perform so well, but because they are a captive voting bloc. And because a compliant bureaucracy is convenient, not as an independent professional counterweight, but as an obedient extension that simply does what politicians say must be done.

The civil servant here is no longer an independent expert, but part of a clientelist political system.

What is missing entirely is any sense of the social contract: salaries and working conditions are a quid pro quo for delivered public value.

As long as citizens must beg for basic services, any call for less work for the same pay is not only inappropriate but downright insulting.

Miguel Goede

Source

Curaçao.nu. (2026, January 23). Ambtenaren willen minder werken voor hetzelfde geld. Curaçao.nu.