R&D’s CAMPAIGN FOR TRADE UNION UNITY AND AGAINST PRECARIOUS CONDITIONS OF EMPLOYMENT
4. CAREER DEVELOPMENT
The introduction of the “Contractual Agent” status at the time of the Kinnock reform of 2004 has been utterly disastrous for all staff who are now Contractual Agents. Everybody agrees, and they are even prepared to put it in writing, but not so many have done what we must all do now – Contractual Agents (CAs) and officials alike – and mount a challenge. R&D here sets out its work, its ambitions and its undertakings in a series of five flyers. This flyer deals with career development.
Compensating for CAs’ salary losses
Salary losses will initially be addressed through better grading systems, but also by CAs being eligible for promotion by rapid salary increases as a result of promotion. As for the money that the Commis- sion has saved, the proportion currently earmarked for career progression is infinitesimal, unaccept- able and deplorable.
R&D negotiates a new assessment and promotion system R&D negotiated two systems (of assessment and promotion) for Contractual Agents in 2007 and 2008.
Whatever the assessment and promotion system may have been, the aim has always been the same:
to increase the rate of promotion significantly; to put a clear, transparent, fair procedure in place.
R&D facilitates Function Group changes
For CAs who are unable to secure contracts lasting more than three years, career progression depends on a change of contract (AC 3 bis). This possibility calls for the establishment of an open labour mar- ket of the type that does not exist at the moment, and which will have to cover all offices and agen- cies. One of the fundamental freedoms in the Treaty of Rome – freedom of movement – does not exist as far as CAs are concerned, and R&D promises to re-establish it.
All of this work is important, but R&D is fully aware that the only real career prospects in this Insti- tution take the form both of becoming an official and of the creation of new jobs to facilitate career progression.