Are you sometimes asked to be available to work at short notice at night, at the weekend or during a holiday? If so, are you getting the right pay? Standby duty is a service when you guarantee to be available to work at short notice outside of the normal Commission working hours: Monday to Friday from 07.00 until 20.00.
Note that standby duty is being available to work. Actual work outside of normal working hours is called ‘out of hours work’ and is treated differently.
The staff regulations state that staff members who are asked to be on standby duty should be compensated. The Commission decided the rate of pay many years ago. However, some staff members are asked to do standby duty and work without pay. Some get time compensation but others do not even get time off.
Generation 2004 has raised this issue several times with the Commission and, recently, we also raised it with the Central Staff Committee (CSC) at its latest meeting on September 20th. As a result of the latter, a working group of the staff committee will now examine a proposal from DG SANTE for standby duties of some Luxembourg based staff. Our position is that staff should receive financial compensation for standby duty and work. All staff should get the same financial compensation for being available to work out of hours – whichever DG they work in and wherever they work.
If you are being asked to do standby duty without pay – then get in touch with us [1]. Generation 2004 will stand by you.
Check out the Central Staff Committee’s communications [2] on this topic
| 17/01/2017 (2017)255576 |
DGT’s stand-by procedure [3] | DGT [4] 03/05/2017 |
| 25/10/2018 (2018)5476369 |
Stand-by duty at DG SANTE [5] + Annex [6] | SANTE [7] 26/11/2018 |
| 18/12/2019 (2019)7798989 |
Standby duties – request for information and consultation [8] + Annex [9] | |
| 03/02/2022 (2022)793994 |
Abuses of DGT standby duty system and lack of overall compensation [10] + Annex [11] | DGT [12] 19/04/2022 CCP [13] 12/07/2022 HR [14] 01/08/2022 |
The Permanent Delegation of Translators [15] has sent many notes [16] too.
toolTips('.classtoolTips19','Staff Regulations of Officials and the Conditions of Employment of Other Servants of the European Union (\'Staff Regulations [17] (SR)\') are rules stating:
• fundamental conditions of service
• basic rights, duties and obligations of staff.
The SR have been reformed x 2 (so far):
• 2004 (Kinnock White paper)
• 2014 (Regulation 1023/2013 [18])
For a summary of stated intentions and real outcomes of those two reforms check out: European Court of Auditors, 2019, Special report no 15/2019 [19]: Implementation of the 2014 staff reform package at the Commission – Big savings but not without consequences for staff
'); toolTips('.classtoolTips47','Trade union or staff association (OSP) [Organisation syndicale et professionnelle]');