Here’s a tale from the e-government bulletin:

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+01: French to Use E-Government to Slash Wages Bill.

Up to half a million jobs will be cut from the French civil service over
the next 10 years as part of a drastic plan to use e-government
technology to boost productivity and slash public spending, the
country’s minister for civil service reform Renaud Dutreil announced
last week.

Dutreil made the remarks at the fifth Worldwide Forum on e-
Democracy in Paris last week (http://www.issy.com/statiques/e-
democratie/index_EN.htm).

(I could not get this url to work, but the e-government bulletin archive can be searched at http://www.headstar.com/egb/archive.html )

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There is a strange tendency to not count civil servants jobs as part of the economy, or civil servants as members of the public. This story could be titled ‘e-government creates unemployment’. It’s all very well to talk about ’slashing the wages bill’ - but what about the wider social costs of all these job losses?