Video download link | md5sum 38a6112b0ab5eb105086e85fb27f5605 Straw Man of Russian Gas Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: The Central Staff Committee of the EPO says that the Office's "solution to the energy crisis" is basically "[p]assing the burden to staff" (their energy bills at home), further eroding their financial state. "This might solve the problem of an energy crisis for the Office," they argue, "but only by passing the burden to staff. Any potential savings achieved by the Office must be passed on to those that will bear the expense of providing a suitable workspace. Furthermore, the official reason for the plan is to “reduce … dependence on Russian energy supplies” rather than any intention for cost saving. Since most of our homes are heated with gas or oil, sending the colleagues home would not necessarily reduce the dependence on Russian energy."

THIS is the third and last video among the latest batch of EPO videos, which deal with lies and propaganda from António Campinos.

Campinos and his friend Benoît Battistelli don't want EPO stakeholders to know that EPO money is being sent to Minsk and that EPO operations too have been partly outsourced.

"Lying has become the universal norm there..."Now the EPO wants to turn off heating (or cooling) and it uses Russia's attack on Ukraine as an excuse. Workers correctly point out that this is in no way decreasing the reliance on Russian energy, but don't expect EPO management to actually come up with real facts. In fact, Campinos will carry on funding the war Ukraine with EPO contracts.

Later this weekend we'll focus on more EPO and Team UPC lies. Lying has become the universal norm there...

Here is the text of the publication shown in the video:

Munich, 14/04/2022 sc22047cp

The EPO’s solution to the energy crisis – passing the burden to staff

Dear Colleagues,

The Office has published an announcement outlining their plan in case of an energy crisis. We received numerous reactions by colleagues who had many questions.

The emergency plan can be summarised as lowering the available workspace by closing entire buildings and further by changing the office temperatures to unpleasant levels. This might solve the problem of an energy crisis for the Office, but only by passing the burden of potential sky-high energy costs to staff, who would be again forced to work from home by the lack of office capacity, and hostile environment. Coupled with a salary adjustment of zero at a time when the inflation is at a decades-long high, this is yet another blow to a dispirited workforce.

We request that any potential savings achieved by the Office be passed on to those that will bear the expense of providing a suitable (in particular sufficiently heated or cooled) workspace – the staff.

Furthermore, the reason for the plan is to “reduce ... dependence on Russian energy supplies” rather than any intention for cost saving. Since most of our homes are heated with gas or oil (and noting for instance that the New Main in The Hague is heated via a heat pump), sending the colleagues home would not necessarily reduce the dependence on Russian energy.

So many questions are still open. As usual, Staff Representation has neither been involved in drawing up the emergency plan nor has Staff Representation been informed or asked for comments before the publication of the emergency plan on the intranet, so any consultation is completely lacking.

We do, however, expect the Office to take into consideration the opinion of staff and their representatives before any action is taken, and ensure that their duty of care is satisfied.

Your Central Staff Committee

In the video above I explain that the passage/transfers of costs and burden to staff aren't limited to energy (there's also food, repair etc.) and it makes the Office a very unattractive employer, curtailing its ability to meet standards or 'compete'.

A reader said there was an in-depth article sometime in the last year about how outsourcing kills an organisation by removing skilled, experienced peers from the pool of skilled, experienced people and thus causing the ones who remain to feel increasingly out of place and isolated until they finally leave as well. While the in-depth article cannot be located at this time, the subject is covered also here, with this widely-known cautionary tale. It's about Boeing; the debacle there was caused by the brain drain that outsourcing causes. Basically by outsourcing Boeing had turned itself from a leader to a backwater, like many universities have been doing in recent decades as well. ⬆

Was the EPO's new building modeled by Gazprom? The Lakhta Center, an 87-story skyscraper in Saint Petersburg, Russia. By Ad Meskens. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.