No agreement with the Commission
and the Council's demands extremely negative
by Ludwig Schubert
19. 11 2011
1) In July we reported on the Commission’s draft proposal to revise the Staff Regulations. The Dialogue procedure with the Commission on this draft proposal ended on 16th November 2011. There was no agreement with the staff representatives (including representatives of AIACE). The Commission intends to confirm its draft proposal on 23rd November, and will then proceed to the obligatory and formal consultation of the staff representation and the Staff Regulations Committee. The Commission wants its firm proposal to reach the Council and Parliament before the end of the year. These institutions will then need to follow the co-decision procedure laid down in Article 236 TFEU of the Treaty of Lisbon in order to adopt an amended statute.
2) The dialogue procedure, and its breakdown, can be summarized as follows:
On 7 September 2011 the Director General of Administration, Irene Souka, set out the work programme. This provided for "administrative level "day-long discussions between the relevant service heads responsible for the draft proposal and the staff representatives (for the AIACE Ludwig Schubert and Pierre Blanchard). In these discussions each explained their positions. No convergence of views was achieved, because the representatives of the administration had been given no room for negotiation. (The minutes of those meetings can be found on MyIntracom.)
Following these meetings came the so-called "technical consultations" with the Director General of Administration. Of these, the early meetings also remained without result. The staff representatives therefore called a General Assembly of the staff for 9th November.
Before this, a meeting took place with the Vice-President Sefcovic on 7th November, which brought the first signs of a willingness to compromise. For us, the most important points were that pensions would be again related to the salaries of active staff in Brussels, and not to a virtual salary applying to active staff only by means of correction coefficients which did not apply to pensions. It was also suggested that the Commission would propose the extension of the validity the method to 10 (instead of 8) years. Another concession to the active staff was that secretaries could continue to be officials, albeit on a salary scale whose level would correspond approximately to the former category D.
The subsequent General Assembly of the staff was a great success. About 2,000 colleagues took part - it would have been more if the doors of the Berlaymont had not had to be closed for security reasons.
Afterwards, the "technical consultations" with the Director General continued in a relaxed atmosphere, so that we hoped that we could reach an agreement. However, this hope was not confirmed in a meeting with the Vice-President on 14th November. A "mediation session" on 16th November was also unsuccessful, and ended with a "constat de désaccord". No new improvement had been achieved. Even technical improvements to the proposal for the method that would have cost nothing (making salary comparisons on a net after tax basis as now, instead on gross before tax, and a better formulation of the exception clause) were rejected without valid argument.
That same evening, the unions sent the Commission a strike notice for the period from 23rd November until 7th December. A new General Assembly the staff is to be held in the Berlaymont at the beginning of the week of 21st November.
3) What really happened? A group of Member States, first 12, then 15 and now 17, told the Commission in the week beginning 14 November that they are looking for much deeper changes to the Staff Regulations than the Commission has so far had in mind. As we had already explained in July, it was unfortunate that the Commission chose to send its draft Statute revisions to the Council before consulting the staff representatives and before the Commission had finally decided its proposal. As a result of this decision, the Commission now feels that it has its hands tied, and that it cannot compromise further with the staff representatives, and that it is under pressure from the Council to be even more negative.
The main demands of the 17 member states, set out in a Council paper can be summarized as follows:
o because of the crisis, "substantial" reductions in expenditure on salaries and pensions are needed;
o the exception clause of the method needs to be able to be implemented wholly at the discretion of the Council;
o in the future, new pensions should not be linked to the last salary, but be based on the average salary over an official’s career, and officials should make a greater contribution to the cost of their pension expense;
o the special levy should be set higher than the planned 5.5% (the Commission now intends to propose now 6%), and it should apply to the whole salary, and to all allowances and pensions as well as to salaries;
o the automatic connection in the annual adjustment between salaries, allowances and pensions should be ended;
o promotion and career opportunities should be more severely restricted;
o the expatriation allowance should be reduced to 10% and after 5 years’ service it should fall each year by 2% to 0% after 10 years’ service; it should be calculated only on basic salary, and not on allowances, nor including any family allowance;
o routine decisions such as the annual adjustment of salaries and pensions should not be delegated to the Commission, as the Commission intends to propose.
4) This list of demands is clearly a provocation. The negotiation and conciliation procedure has shown that the Commission is extremely weak, and ready to take seriously unwarranted criticism from the Council , including concerning the fully justified technical details of the method. Nevertheless, the Commission's sole right of proposal, and the need for a motivated and efficient European public service, remain our best defense against the attacks of the Council. Ultimately, these attacks are inspired by a subordinate Council group. It is important that the Commission is reminded of their self-interest and of the fact that the method is the protection against conflict, just as it guarantees that European public service pay closely follows national developments of salaries, both negative and positive. Furthermore, our pension system is in equilibrium, and our pensions were paid for long ago through the contributions of both staff and employer.
AIACE has made representations in this sense already in October 2010 (see VOX No.86) and in early November this year (cf. the next No.89 from VOX) to the President Barroso and Vice-President Sefcovic, each with a letter from the President of the AIACE accompanied by a technical Appendix. In the coming days, weeks and months there will be new negotiations, which could be accompanied by strikes of the active staff, as in 1981 and 1991. The representatives of AIACE will try hard to put forward our good factual and convincing arguments to the decision-making authorities (Commission, Council and Parliament).
