Brussels, 20 November 2025
Note to the attention of
Mr. Stephen QUEST, Director-General DG HR
Subject: Large-scale review – Participation of the Central Staff Committee / Trade unions
Dear Mr Quest,
The Central Staff Committee (CSC) and the Representative Trade Unions would like to thank you for your presentation in the Central Staff Committee plenary meeting on October 23, 2025, about the Large-Scale Review (LSR). We would like also to thank you for your confirmation that the Staff Regulations are beyond the scope of this exercise and therefore, no matter what the outcome/conclusions of this exercise will be, there will be no request for a reform.
During the presentation it was also mentioned that the inception phase of this exercise included consultation with around 1000 staff members, including (senior) managers, staff and even Junior Professionals. Nevertheless, it never included a proper consultation of the Staff Committee, the committee that according to article 9 of the Staff Regulations represents the staff and can express the opinion of staff. Following this presentation, the CSC received a letter by the LSR team’s chair, Mr. McAleavey that the CCP could “submit written contributions on any – or even all – workstreams” and that the LSR team would “be pleased to facilitate meetings between colleagues designated by the Central Staff Committee and the workstream leaders, where relevant, to discuss your contributions and the progress in the relevant workstreams.”.
While we welcome the opening from DG HR’s side with regards to contribution from the CSC and the Trade Unions on the workstreams, at the same time, we regret that the offer by DG-HR is “too little and too late”. We feel that in the frame of this exercise, DG HR doesn’t really want to recognise the statutory role of Staff Committee and that of the trade unions as the most important, not to say the unique, social parties. This is even more discouraging for elected staff representatives as this extremely limited involvement of the staff representatives doesn’t appear to be coherent even with the Commission’s own opinion on social dialogue. Just by a fast reading of the Commission’s Communication on “Strengthening social dialogue in the European Union: harnessing its full potential for managing fair transitions”, one can note the lack of coherence; among other things it is mentioned that “Social partners’ involvement improves policy-making and law-making”, or that “Strong social partners are essential for effective and balanced change management”. In the same spirit, the Council mentions that “the systematic involvement of social partners and other relevant stakeholders is key for the success of economic and employment policy coordination and implementation”.
The LSR is exactly an exercise that aims at identifying areas of improvement, at proposing changes, and at achieving transition to new processes and new ways of operating; hence the request by the Staff Committee and by the Trade Unions to be actively included as an equal partner in this exercise. Our repeated request to be actively involved is also in response to the request by President’s Von der Leyen invitation of September 10, 2025, whose email to all staff concluded: “Finally, I use this opportunity to invite you to engage with the large-scale review of the Commission’s organisation and operations currently underway. Your insights are vital to this work, to shape a Commission able to deliver for Europeans in a rapidly changing world.”
The CSC and Trade union members can have very valuable insights which can be extremely useful if we are given the opportunity to fully participate in the works of the workstreams, in the benchmarking exercise and in the High-Level Group. Asking us just to “share contributions” in a generic manner, without the possibility to present and explain them or to comment on other contributions is simply counter-productive for us. The Staff Committee and the Trade unions have clear roles to play which include a proper and timely consultation, the sharing of documentation, effective dialogue with a genuine eagerness from the side of the administration to discuss, before decisions are taken. If the above-mentioned elements are missing, the staff representatives are hindered from exercising their roles and can in no way be considered as “consulted”.
To address the above issues, the CSC/TUs are proposing the following active participation ways:
- 1) Inclusion of 2 staff representatives in each workstream;
- 2) Participation of 2 staff representatives in the High Level Group as members, or as observers;
- 3) Early sharing with the CSC/Trade unions of the intermediate conclusions of all work streams, due for February 2026;
- 4) Consultation on the preliminary recommendations and the final draft report of the LSR.
The staff representatives would like once again to reiterate their welcoming of making our Organization more modern, more agile and more flexible and our aforementioned proposals aim exclusively to help reaching these goals.
Athanasios KATSOGIANNIS
Central Staff Committee
Cristiano SEBASTIANI / Raul TRUJILLO
Alliance
Marcela VALKOVA
Generation 2004
Nicolas MAVRAGANIS
USF
Georges VLANDAS / Helen CONEFREY
RS-U4U/USHU
cc.: Mr. Grzegorz Radziejewski, Ms Ana Carrero
Mr. Christian Roques, Mr. Christian Linder, Mr. Stanislav Demirdjiev,
Mr. Laurent Duluc, Mr. Beniamino Annis, Mr. Paul McAleavey