ABSTRACT
There used to be a proverb in Swedish that read that the share of the state was scanty but secure. 1 It meant that you did not choose a civil servant career because of the good money, but because you were more or less guaranteed safe employment. The proverb is hardly applicable nowadays, since the public sector underwent severe cutbacks during the 1990s and many civil servants learned that a civil servant position was no guarantee against unemployment. Furthermore, when it comes to the terms of public employment, the prerequisites have drastically changed over the last decades, thereby deviating increasingly from underlying Weberian ideals operationalized as pay grades and set initial wages.
