It seems our article on the Brussels Local Staff Committee (LSC) positive change [1] from last month was perhaps given the wrong title. Following the latest March plenary session, we now believe a question mark is needed. The correct title would then be: Positive change at the Brussels Local Staff Committee?
We believe this is so because of the positions and actions of some trade unions during the March plenary session, held with the single point of electing a new president of the LSC Brussels and this despite the request by Generation 2004 to include other points of more relevance for staff in the agenda. Namely:
- A vote during plenary on a file (inexplicably launched as a written procedure before the plenary meeting with a deadline after the said meeting) to support the salary update of a Local Agent colleague in the Commission representation to Ireland, and
- a debate on the Corona virus crisis just before everyone was sent into Teleworking in mid-march.
It is thus quite disturbing to see some bad old patterns of “work” resurfacing. This is more so if we consider the previous LSC mandate, headed by Generation 2004 and where we showed how work for staff should be conducted.
For the new presidential election, Generation 2004 put forward a young, not divisive, transparent and female candidate. She was contesting the post against a candidate proposed by a coalition of several unions; a candidate who is a long-standing ‘professional’ unionist, with a history of over 20 years of secondment to the staff representation and who was proposed in a speech by the head of the coalition who in that speech raised as the sole argument that electing his candidate would be a goodbye gift… In short, a fresh restart was opposed by the status quo.
In the end, the result was inconclusive as neither of the two candidates got enough support to be elected (14 votes out of 27 are necessary) and the Brussels LSC continues operating without a president. However, the result clearly shows that even from the coalition ranks, a few voted NOT to elect someone from the status quo! Not all is lost!