Abolishing Ward Director System… Government Cannot Act Unilaterally

Local governments including Suwon City are resisting as the central government has unilaterally issued personnel and organizational improvement guidelines, including the abolition of the ward director system, without considering regional circumstances. If the ward director system is abolished, there are concerns not only about increased inconvenience for residents due to the placement of administrative personnel with lower expertise in social welfare, but also a deterioration in the quality of administrative services.

The Ministry of the Interior and Safety notified each city and county in May of "Social Welfare Personnel and Organizational Improvement Guidelines" that include the abolition of the ward director system to efficiently manage personnel in local governments and resolve structural problems and expand welfare projects. The content calls for repositioning the heads of residential life teams and administrative service teams that previously existed at ward community centers to perform field work rather than administrative duties.

The proportion of social welfare personnel in wards is to be expanded to approximately 40% of the total ward workforce, with the ministry proposing methods to address the shortage through the use of surplus personnel resulting from mergers and consolidations of small wards (population less than 20,000, area less than 3 square kilometers), as well as administrative interns and those awaiting appointment. However, if the ward has a staff of 12 or more, one overall team leader can be assigned.

However, regarding these guidelines from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, local governments including Suwon City are resisting the demand to abolish the ward director system following unilateral personnel reduction measures.

Since the system was expanded to a two-director system in 2006 to strengthen ward functions, only to now be facing abolition, the operation of frontline administrative organizations is becoming unstable, and there are concerns about deterioration in the quality of social welfare work, which requires expertise.

A city official stated, "While claiming to improve and expand social welfare services, attempting to solve this through the rotation and replacement of non-specialist personnel is merely a stopgap measure," and pointed out, "Moreover, since differences in welfare demand arise according to regional characteristics and population structure, uniform placement of welfare personnel does not match field civil complaints."

Looking at the city alone, Yeongdong 1-dong with a population of approximately 50,000 has only about 600 welfare demand targets, while Uman 1-dong reaches approximately 3,000, requiring different applications of welfare position sizes.

In particular, concerns also arise about a deterioration in service quality to the public due to decreased work motivation among city civil servants suffering from severe personnel backlogs. If the ward director system is abolished, the current 78 grade-6 (assistant section chief) team leaders in 39 wards will be converted to non-duty positions. Out of wards with 12 or more staff, only 6 team leaders will remain in the 6 wards, and the positions of the remaining 72 will disappear.

A city official emphasized, "Currently, grade-7 civil servants in the city take an average of 11.2 years to be promoted to grade-6 for administrative positions, 5.5 years for social welfare positions, and 10.8 years for facilities positions—reaching a serious level," and stated, "The abolition of the director system will only result in lowering the morale of civil servants working in the field."

Accordingly, the city has not yet submitted a plan that the Ministry of the Interior and Safety requested by the end of May. Instead, it has made recommendations to the Ministry of the Interior and Safety jointly with the province and 31 cities and counties within the province to guarantee the autonomy of local governments in line with the purpose of the total personnel budget system.