On 6 November, the European Trade Union Confederation announced in a hurriedly produced leaflet that, ‘contrary to statements issued by the Commission, which thinks it can count on the majority support from the trade unions for its reform proposals, Solidarité Européenne (SE in Luxembourg), the Syndicat des Fonctionnaires Européens (SFE in Brussels) and the CISL (in Ispra) have not signed blank cheques for the Commission’.

The protocol has a single objective: assisting the trade union best disposed to ‘collaborating’ with a smokescreen, and thereby with an excuse for accepting the calamitous Kinnock reform. The protocol is ‘political’, in other words its legal validity is extremely limited.

R&D and the other trade unions (FFPE, SFIE and TAO-AFI) have not taken part in negotiations on the protocol. Their reasons for this are as follows:

• to respect the mandate of the 25 October General Staff Meeting that had called for consultation and a ballot. The Commission, the Administration and Union Syndicale are opposed to this consultation;
• not to give grounds for believing that Career C was accompanied by real budgetary guarantees;
• to ensure that the Commission had no alibi for deciding on 30 October.

A superficial glance at the protocol suggests that the guarantees:

• are already part of the reform (writing the method of adapting salary and pension into the Staff Regulations – turned down by the Council; maintaining the global level of salary and pensions; and retaining the statutory pension scheme);

• are already obligations for the Institution (transitional Staff Regs provisions relating to existing rights, in particular taking account of the situation of people whose income is directly or indirectly under pressure from the consequences of the reform;

• already form part of the basic rules of social dialogue (‘the Commission is already contractually committed with the trade unions to put in place a reciprocal information, monitoring, consultation and concertation mechanism throughout the decision-making process);

• are generic statements and lacking in real content because the guarantees are in fact non-existent: writing promotion rates into the Staff Regulations, thereby ensuring that career prospects on average match current prospects (what current prospects?); ‘finalisation of the new grid containing 16 grades and 5 steps will be based on the most favourable Option to staff at current costs‘ (Who will decide?); ‘should the Council decide to unanimously distort one of the elements of guarantee, the Commission undertakes to withdraw its proposal on the basis of a statement drawn up jointly during the concertation that it had itself opened’ (Who will decide whether the Council has distorted the Commission’s proposal? Why does it have to be unanimous distortion by the Council?);

• are too weak: the new category of contractual agents provided for in the Staff Regulations may be employed way beyond what is currently set out in writing. If the protocol restricts the employment of contractual agents to existing bodies, or to bodies set up founded under a specific law (e.g. European Commission representations in the EU, EC Delegations outside the EU, agencies and offices) and, in Institution services, with the sole exception of duties currently performed by category D, it will protect no one. In practice, the legal validity of the Staff Regulations is greater than that of the protocol.

The Executive Committee

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