Another Italian Member for the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame

Dan Mitchell

Jul 1

I created the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame to give recognition to government employees who confirm our worst suspicions about being lazy and overpaid. Or worse.

Getting selected is not easy. For instance, the bureaucrats from the New Orleans Sewerage and Water Board (the focus of yesterday's column) did not make it into the Hall of Fame.

This is an "honor" reserved for those who go way above and beyond the call of duty.

Such as Cinzia Paolina De Lio.

Who is this person? What makes her worthy of being inducted into the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame?

She's an Italian teacher. But she's a teacher who almost never taught. She missed 20 years of work over her 24-year career.

How long do you think you could skive off work for before you start to get into trouble? A week? Two? How about twenty years? It might sound ridiculous, but apparently it can be done. Just ask Cinzia Paolina De Lio. ...De Lio had been hired to teach at the secondary school near Venice, where she was supposed to fill her students' minds with everything they needed to know about literature and philosophy. ...The teacher is said to have used sick leave, holiday time and permits to attend conferences to avoid giving lessons at the school, and on the rare occasions she did turn up, she didn't do a very good job of educating the students. ...De Lio was sacked by the school for her behaviour, but she took the case to court and managed to get her job back. ...De Lio's casual approach to her career came back to bite her when the court realised she'd only been present in the class for four years out of 24. ...Journalists attempted to contacted De Lio in the wake of her firing, The Times reports, but she was unable to comment on the situation because she was busy - at the beach.

By the way, Ms. De Lio is not the first foreigner in the Bureaucrat Hall of Fame. She's not even the first Italian.

But she nonetheless can be proud of being the 7th non-American to earn this special recognition. Here are the other foreign awardees.

An Italian government doctor who worked only 15 days in a nine-year period.
A bureaucrat in India's Public Works Department stopped showing up for work in 1990 and didn't get fired until 2014.
In France (gee, what a surprise), a bureaucrat was provided a car and driver by taxpayers, yet still managed to run up nearly $150-per-day of taxi cab expenses.
The English bureaucrat who worked in law enforcement by day and promoted anti-Western Jihad by night.
A bureaucrat in Spain got a service award even though he hadn't shown up for work in six years.
The bureaucrat in the United Kingdom who advocated strict stay-at-home rules while exempting his f**k buddy.

I'll close by making a very serious point about public policy. Ms. De Lio almost certainly was able to retain her job for so long because of so-called employment protection laws, which basically make it very difficult to fire bad workers.

In the private sector, such laws discourage employers from hiring people in the first place. In the government sector, they enable and allow scammers like Ms. De Lio to bilk taxpayers.