What are the problems faced by Contract Agents today?
- Growing population of CAs in the EU Institutions and Research Executive agencies against a backdrop of shrinking number of permanent posts
- Non-permanent staff (CA 3b) increasingly forced to carry-out permanent tasks
- Many CAs in the JRC performing administrative rather than scientific tasks
- Non existing job market for CAs inside EU Institutions
Contract Agents account for more than a quarter of the European Institution’s population and about half of the staff of the JRC. Limited access to decent employment opportunities in the Institutions, insufficient job security and unfair working conditions have become every day’s reality for many Contract Agents at the JRC. Contract Agents are also the primary victims of budgetary restrictions! But Contract Agents should not be used as an underpaid, yet highly qualified work force! Generation 2004 has denounced this practice over and over again. See our articles from newsletters 22 and 26.
Equal pay for equal work is a principle that must apply to Contract Agents too!
The lack of valuable career opportunities is also harmful to the institutions when the victims realise that they have been lured. Moreover, when secure jobs are available in the research executive agencies, these positions are not sufficiently well advertised in Ispra and Seville. Furthermore, a complaint that is voiced quite often by research CAs in Ispra and Seville is that they are required to carry out administrative tasks or tasks which are only marginally related to their research work. This is very demotivating and undermines their career perspectives outside the JRC.
Last but not least, when a Contract Agents succeed in passing all the hurdles and finally get a secure position, they are automatically recruited under the less favorable post-2014 conditions, no matter when they were first recruited in the institutions, in breach of the principle of acquired rights. Generation 2004 insists that getting a permanent job should not come at the cost of being downgraded! See our article from newsletter 20.
Therefore a real and attractive inter-institutional job market needs to be created within the institutions!
What Generation 2004 does for YOU:
Generation 2004 has Contract Agents dealing with Contract Agents’ issues and we have worked on the matter long before others have woken up:
- The improvement of the situation of Contract Agents in Ispra and Seville continues to be one of our top priority for the next 3 years both here in Ispra/Seville as well as in Brussels, where Generation 2004 is at the forefront of the fight against unequal treatment and discrimination in the Commission, including the abuse of CAs as an underpaid but highly qualified and quasi permanent work force! See our articles from newsletters 20, 23(a), 23(b), 26 and 28.
- We have called upon on HR to organize regular internal competitions as the ONLY way to offer CAs privileged access to permanent positions and already years ago we have made proposals for this purpose. However, don’t let yourself be fooled by what others are promising. The maximum number of posts that can be offered to CAs following this route is small and hard limited by the staff regulations (art. 82 (7)). In a nutshell: before the first CA can be recruited with this method, 19 officials have to be recruited from open competitions. See our article from newsletter 24.
- Recruitment policy in the JRC is a mess with no strategic perspective whatsoever. Our representatives in the Local Staff Committee have therefore repeatedly called upon the administration to adopt a long term vision on recruitment which helps to preserve scientific expertise and offers employment perspectives for those who wish to pursue a career in the JRC. For this purpose, research competition, open to the disciplines required by the JRC, must be organized regularly.
If you believe our work with Contract Agents and for Contract Agents is worth it, then please vote for Generation 2004, vote list 1!
