employment relationship (78), labour mobility (67), career development (60) and occupational accidents or disease (54). In general, complaints concerning selection and recruitment procedures keep revealing that the irregular or illegal conduction of public tenders is recurrent, regardless of the important consequences it brings, not only to the affected candidates, but also to the Administration. In fact, public recruitment procedures aim to select the best candidate and that objective can not be fulfilled if they are faulty. Therefore, once again in 2016, the Ombudsman repeatedly drew the public entities’ attention to unlawful practices, such as: introducing illegal requirements that inhibit potential candidates; excluding candidates from procedures on merely formalistic or bureaucratic grounds; applying discriminatory criteria on the evaluation of the candidates’ curriculum, etc. In regard to working conditions, the many complainants have once again fought unjustified or poorly grounded decisions taken by public employers to refuse flexible or continuous work schedules, even when an adequate conciliation of work and family life is at stake. Public entities continue to show some resistance in assessing, in particular, the needs of the worker and the effective repercussion their claim would have on the entities’ activity or organization, even when urged to do so by the Ombudsman or the Commission for Equality in Labour and Employment. This year, for instance, the Ombudsman had to persuade a hospital to abide to the recommendations of this Commission on the subject of authorizing flexible schedules. As those recommendations are mandatory, the hospital resorted to purely formal arguments, in order not to comply with the instructions given by the Commission for Equality. On the subject of employment relationship, the cases on precarious contracting of work or disguised employment in the Public Administration (v.g., false self-employment, irregular internships or research grants, employment-insertion contracts and employment-insertion+contracts(25)) should be highlighted. Although this problem has for long deserved the attention of the Ombudsman, this year the Budget of State Law for 2016 determined that the Government should launch a multiannual strategy to combat precarious forms of employment in public bodies (article 19). In this context, besides considering particular complaints, the Ombudsman has been monitoring the launch of this strategy and the adoption of further proposals or recommendations shall be considered. The right to compensation for the damages suffered in consequence of occupational accidents or disease also motivated the Ombudsman to take position in some relevant cases concerning: the possibility to accumulate compensation for permanent partial disability with other income (see below, § b) of No. 6.6.1.); the right to compensation of (25)  Employment-insertion contracts and employment-insertion+contracts are the names of two programmes which aim to promote employment. These contracts are celebrated between public or private entities and people who are unemployed or receiving unemployment compensation, which agree to perform tasks considered “socially useful”. 50 |