After several months of complete silence, DG HR has finally unveiled its revised proposal for a reform of Staff Representation. The document, which was circulated shortly before Christmas and formally presented on January 17, before being discussed with unions, foresees only one single staff committee, located in Brussels composed of members directly and simultaneously elected in all Commission sites and delegations.
While the proposal does away with a multitude of different electoral rules and dates and thus addresses one of the shortcomings of the current system, it does not only fail to ensure a proper representation of staff at each site, but effectively abolishes any kind of local staff representation. In other words, no local staff committee or any other designated body is foreseen in Luxemburg, Petten or Ispra, and of course nothing whatsoever for Seville either.
Instead, the newly formed Staff Committee will have to deal with everything, from coffee prices in the local canteen to the implementation of the promotion system, from staff shortages in a European School to appointments to EPSO juries. How this mega staff committee is supposed to achieve all this has so far remained a well-kept secret of DG HR. Or should the ultimate aim be to paralyze staff representation by swamping the staff committee with dozens of site-specific odds and ends?
Of course, recital 8 of the HR proposal gives to locally elected delegates the task to deal with local matters. But how they are supposed to do that, for instance whether they can take decisions autonomously, is left in the dark. Moreover, in Article 5 of the said proposal the staff committee is given the task to deal with matters which affect one or several sites.
Therefore, what is now being proposed, flies in the face of all those who thought that subsidiarity would be one of the guiding principles of the European Union. It would create a level of centralization, of which Louis XIV would surely be proud. And it largely ignores the demands and suggestions voiced by several unions, including Generation2004, on the occasion of the social dialogue in the first half of 2018.
At that time already, Generation 2004 had tabled a model for staff representation in the Commission which would combine directly elected delegates to a single staff committee responsible for cross-cutting matters with dedicated local bodies for each site responsible for taking care of local issues and consisting of both central staff committee delegates and supplementary members. Thus neither would Petten, Geel, Seville, Karlsruhe and Ispra be thrown together, as DG HR now wants to do, nor would the central staff committee have to deal with local matters.
In addition, Generation 2004’s proposal suggested that the number of delegates to the staff committee for each site should better reflect actual staff numbers at that site, while guaranteeing a minimum number of delegates for each site. If that sounds odd to you, remember that this is the same principle which is applied in the European Parliament and the Council, where smaller Member States have more seats than what their population numbers would imply. While that may lead to a smaller number of delegates for currently overrepresented sites, it will ensure that also small sites have their say without unduly inflating the staff committee.
In DG HR’s current proposal nothing of that kind can be found and the reactions by some other unions were thus predictable given their general hostility to any kind of reform. However, opposing a reform means carving in stone the current situation or even worse – with an inefficient central staff committee paralyzed by different election dates, with local staff representation worrying more about electoral rules and committee seats rather than people’s real needs, and with no proper staff representation for Seville.
