Men at work (NOT!)

I wonder how many American municipalities might have this problem too?

The mayor of a small town outside Naples had to shut down most municipal offices after police arrested 23 of his staff in the latest revelations of absenteeism in Italy’s public sector.

Staff were filmed clocking in and then leaving to go about their personal business or using multiple swipe cards to register absent colleagues, police said, in scenes that have become familiar after numerous similar scandals.

A police video showed one man trying to tamper with a security camera and then putting a cardboard box over his head to hide his identity before swiping two cards.

Police arrested around half of all employees in the town hall offices of Boscotrecase following a weeks-long investigation that they said revealed 200 cases of absenteeism involving 30 people.

“I’ll probably have to shut down the town hall,” Pietro Carotenuto, elected a month ago as mayor of the town of 11,000 people, told Sky Italia.

There's more at the link.

That's an endemic workplace culture, if you ask me!  There's no way it could have just suddenly started happening.  It must have been going on for years . . . which invites the question:  why wasn't it uncovered long ago?  Could it be, just possibly, that most of those who should have recognized the problem, and stopped it, were instead doing the same thing?  It reminds me of the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal - corruption becoming endemic in the system, to the point where the system itself became corrupt.

Peter