Generation 2004 continues to support Contract Agents in Luxembourg as they fight for a decent pay or for that matter, a pay that is not below the legal Luxembourgish minimum.
Several meetings between the staff representatives and DG HR have taken place over the past days and weeks and although some concessions were proposed by the administration, fundamental differences unfortunately remain. DG HR considers any salary compensation out of the question and instead proposes to stop the movement with “social measures” such as – for instance – the ludicrous proposal of reducing the price of (some) meals in the cafeteria. The idea of being silenced with a baguette springs to mind instantly, doesn’t it? Or Marie Antoinette’s infamous proposal to “let them eat cake”, when faced by the first uprisings of the French revolution.
A few interesting lines emerged, such as:
- when HR representative Deputy DG Levasseur reminded Union Syndicale [2] that after all it was them who signed the 2004 reform, thereby creating the class of Contract Agents;
- when Generation 2004 suggested to obtain the resources for a sufficient salary compensation by merely delaying the creation of some 60 Senior Expert posts by a single year, the answer was a laugh… and a statement that “we don’t think we want to delay Senior Experts”!
In the meantime, the fight goes on as we again implore all of you to support the weakest of our post-2004 colleagues by donating something on the following account opened by the LUX Local Staff Committee:
toolTips('.classtoolTips23','Contract Agents (CAs) were created by the 2004 staff regulations Reform. There are two types of CA: those with unlimited contracts, 3A [3] (‘indefinite’) and those with time-limited contracts [4], 3B [5]. CAs can belong to 4 different function groups (\'GF\') with different responsibilities and salaries [6].
As the use of contract staff becomes increasingly common, there has been a corresponding increase in the diversity of status and pay of the Commission’s workforce. For example, GFIV contract staff meeting the same minimum recruitment requirements (education and experience) as junior administrators may earn 28 % less. (European Court of Auditors, 2019, Special report no 15/2019 [7]: Implementation of the 2014 staff reform package at the Commission – Big savings but not without consequences for staff, point 61, page 34)
We have a working group dedicated to the dossier, and in December 2012 we addressed the first of many letters (\'notes\') about Contract Agents to Human Resources of all Institutions and agencies [8] (here is the cover e-mail [9]).
As a background you can see the report of the Commission to the Council regarding the recruitment of the contract agents in 2010 [10] (in French, COM(2011)802 final 23.11.2011).
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