Bonum Certa Men Certa

The EPO is Cruel to Patent Examiners Because Corporations, Not Even European Ones, Always Come First

Sickness interferes with corporate profits! STOP GETTING SICK AND GO BACK TO WORK!

Video download link | md5sum 04336bf5d084c5b630f63884b4a8a367 EPO is a Sick Employer Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: Sickness-related rights of staff are being weakened or abolished and staff representatives caution national representatives to prevent that from exacerbating even further

The Central Staff Committee (CSC) of the EPO has circulated this recent letter with many annexes added underneath. [PDF] (No metadata in it that contains names)



The document (letter and a lot more, even E-mails) concerns sickness/illness. In times of pandemic not only do many people get ill; some suffer long-lasting agony (e.g. "long COVID") and deserve sympathy from their employer. Myself and my wife worked (a combined) 21 years for the same employer without ever taking any sick leave, yet the employer treated us very badly. Imagine how much worse if would be if we asked for a day off due to bad health.

In the EPO, the situation is further complicated because when rights of staff are weakened that necessarily translates into an inability to recruit high-calibre people who can properly judge patent applications. As the video above notes, everyone in Europe will suffer from that as corporations will receive more fake patents (some large stakeholders already complain out in the open about the collapse of patent quality at the EPO).

Here's a communication to staff, dated yesterday, about the document above:

Letter to AC delegations: Detrimental adjustment to the health services (CA/85/22)



Dear colleagues,

The President tabled a reform of the health services (CA/85/22) for the meeting of the Administrative Council on 13-14 December 2022, which will further restrict the rights of sick staff.

In this open letter, we explain to the heads of delegation how the upcoming reform will supplement the 2015 reform and further harm the most vulnerable category of staff, sick staff, and urge them not to adopt document CA/85/22.


The key part is the letter, not the annexes, so we're reproducing it below as HTML, GemText, and plain text:

European Patent Office | 80298 MUNICH | GERMANY

Heads of Delegation in the Administrative Council By email

OPEN LETTER



centralSTCOM@epo.org Reference: sc22147cl Date: 09/12/2022

Detrimental adjustment to the health services (CA/85/22)



Dear Heads of Delegation,

The President has tabled a reform of the health services (CA/85/22) for the upcoming meeting of the Administrative Council which will further restrict the rights of sick staff.

The 2015 reform of sick leave and invalidity had already negatively affected staff and is currently under legal challenge:

− the computation of sick leave, where any part-time absence on a working day is counted as a full day of sick leave, is prejudicial to staff entering or in extended sick leave or (partial) incapacity because it resulted in them suffering salary deductions, unlike other staff (e.g. in the case of Covid-19 infections).

− the abolition of the invalidity lump sum insurance has violated the legitimate expectations of EPO staff who had been contributing to the insurance for many years. The Office did not follow the unanimous opinion of the Appeals Committee in favour of staff, leaving them no other option than to challenge the decision before the Tribunal right in the middle of the pandemic.

− the abolition of a medical committee, which previously had a balanced composition, paved the way for an unbalanced procedure fully empowering the medical practitioner (medical advisor) chosen by the President of the Office alone for the purpose of issuing medical opinions on incapacity.




The Health Services should not be merged

The Health Services are currently organised in two separate teams:

1) an Occupational Health Service (OHS) responsible for staff on sick leave (less than 125 days in 18 consecutive months) and providing advice and support to staff members,

2) a Medical Advisory Unit (MAU) responsible for staff on sick leave for more than 125 days in 18 consecutive months and issuing opinions for the President for the purpose of taking potentially adverse administrative decisions (e.g. salary deductions, forced return to work...).

The proposed reform pretends to introduce “a seamless sick leave process” by merging the two teams. In our view, a sick staff member cannot build trust with the practitioner supposed to support them if this same practitioner is also actively involved in making potentially adverse decisions. Moreover, independence is at risk as the practitioner will find himself in an inherent conflict of interest. Such a reform would even be illegal in our major host country, Germany, as confirmed by the Mercer Marsh Benefits report.

Data protection issues

As a consequence of the reform, the two separate medical case management systems of OHS and MAU would be merged. It was an inherent strength of the system that medical data was accessed by different persons for different purposes: one to support staff, the other one (only if required) to be involved in making adverse decisions. The merge would increase the number of “health professionals” and administrative support staff who have access to the medical data of all staff, without asking the staff member for their consent.

In addition, the Staff Committee was never informed about how the Data Protection Officer has been involved.

Amendments in the Service Regulations outside the scope of the Working Group and not discussed

The document presents amendments to the Service Regulations allegedly to support implementation of “a seamless sick leave process”. None of the amendments were necessary for this purpose. Nor were they within the scope of the Working Group set up to discuss the reorganisation of the health services and were not discussed.




In particular:

− allowing the EPO medical practitioner to contact the employee’s doctor without their consent is a violation of the employee’s right to privacy and a blank check for violation of medical secrecy,

- the use of personal medical data for other purposes without the employee’s consent breaches data protection,

- the employee’s right to access medical data is now restricted,

- the establishment of new conditions for disregarding evidence voluntarily submitted by the employee deprives them of the possibility of handling their own medical situation in front of the employer,

- the employee’s access to the arbitration procedure in case of disagreement with a medical opinion is now restricted.

More details can be found in our opinion in the General Consultative Committee of 22 November 2022, which is annexed to this letter.

Conclusion

The proposed reform is detrimental to staff, endangers the independence of the “health professionals”, endangers medical secrecy and risks creating an atmosphere of mistrust. It would be illegal in our major host country, Germany. Furthermore, the reform introduces, after the 2015 reform, further restrictions on the rights of sick staff, raising the question of whether the health and well-being of staff is the priority for the EPO.

For the sake of sick staff, we urge the Council not to approve document CA/85/22.

Yours sincerely,

Alain Dumont Chairman of the Central Staff Committee

Annex: Opinion of the CSC members of the GCC on GCC/DOC 27/2022: Adjustments to health services (CA/85/22)


Based on constitutions and international conventions (on human rights), some staff protections are not negotiable. But the EPO believes that because it is in "no-man's land" it is free to violate people's fundamental rights as if there's no consequence to be feared.

Patent examiners at the EPO are besieged by corrupt management, appointed and supported by rogue law firms and monopolies. Many of these aren't even European, so they actively work to undermine Europe's interests and the triumph of scientific advancement (they want profit, not progress). This imperils the world, not only Europe.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Quality Comes First (Techrights Search)
It's generally working already, but we wish to polish it some more
Techrights Party Countdown
Late next week we'll be holding a party near our home
European Parliament and Council Directive on Privacy is Vanishing
"edited / censored some time more recently"
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 28, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Slopwatch: The March of Slopfarms, From UbuntuPIT to Linux Journal and to Various Fake Sites Still Promoted by Google News
It's so worrying to see what the Web has become
Links 29/10/2025: CISA, Ukraine, and Amazon Problems
Links for the day
[Teaser] The EPO's Spokesperson, a Cocaine User, Fancies Young Women
How's that for "optics" in the EU and Europe's second-largest institution?
How Will António Campinos Respond to the EPO's 'Cocainegate'?
That's the same thing we saw and still see when the press deals with enablers and partners of Jeffrey Epstein
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part IV: There Cannot be Free Software Without Free Press and Free Information
One day, one can hope, more people will recognise that for Software Freedom we need free press and free thinkers
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part III: Principled Stance Is Never Cheap
Protecting the truth and insisting that the general public is made aware of things that really happened isn't cheap
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part II: Because Scarcity of Accurate Information Breeds Collective Ignorance
we too will strive to share information that's aggressively suppressed
Gemini Links 28/10/2025: More New Arrivals at Geminispace, xkcd on "Document Forgery"
Links for the day
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part I: Defence of the Truth
This year we make a very strong, firm statement for truth, even if that means explaining our work to the top media judge in the country
Links 28/10/2025: Meta and Fentanylware (CheeTok) Age-Restricted Down Under, "Britain Needs China’s Money"
Links for the day
Links 28/10/2025: Mass Layoffs at Amazon and Charter to Cut 1,200 Jobs
Links for the day
The Cocaine Patent Office - Part II: The Person Who Planted Paid-for Fake News for the European Patent Office (EPO) is a Cocaine User, Friend of António Campinos, Now on Record as Having Been Arrested
Background: High-level manager at the European Patent Office caught in public with cocaine, arrested
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 27, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, October 27, 2025
Google News Drowning in Slop (and Slopfarms That Hijack About Half the Results)
Google News seems to be drowning in this stuff
Gemini Links 28/10/2025: "How to Maximize Your Positive Impact" and ASCII Art and Artist Attribution
Links for the day
PETA and Activism
Being staff or volunteer in PETA isn't easy
Big Blue, Huge Debt
debt will soar again
Links 27/10/2025: Mass Surveillance Sold as "AI", People Reluctant to Lose Physical Media
Links for the day
Parties and Milestones Again
we've begun putting up about 40 balloons
Techrights' 19th Anniversary: Bronze
Time to go back to preparing for this anniversary
Our Latest European Patent Office (EPO) Series Will Last Several Weeks, Will Ask the EPO Management and the European Union (EU) Very Difficult Questions
If nobody loses a job (or jobs) over this, then the EU basically became no better than Colombia or Nicaragua
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, UbuntuPIT, Brian Fagioli, and Google News
We focus on stories that are fake or LLM slop that disguises itself as "news" about Linux
Links 27/10/2025: Wikipedia Vandalism, Bruce Perens Opens up on Childhood
Links for the day
This Site Could Not be Done by LLMs Even If It Wanted to (Because It's Not a Parrot of What Other Sites Say)
LLMs have no knowledge or deep understanding
Microsoft is Disloyal Towards Its Most Loyal Employees
Against its most faithful enablers
19 Years, No Censorship
No factual information is ever going to be removed, more so if it is in the public interest
We Are Not a Conventional Site, That's Why They Hate (or Love) Us
Throughout the week this week we'll be focusing on the EPO
Following the Line of Cocaine All the Way to the Top
Even a million denials and spin-doctoring won't distract from the core issue
The Cocaine Patent Office - Part I: António Campinos Brought Corruption and Nepotism to the EPO, Then Came the Cocaine
High-level manager at the European Patent Office (EPO) caught in public with cocaine, the Office has some answering to do
Purchasing/Possessing Computers Isn't the Same as Controlling Computers
Let's strive to put computers back under the control of their users, no matter who purchased these (usually the users)
Gemini Links 27/10/2025: Alhena 5.4.3 and Fixing Bash
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 26, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, October 26, 2025
Thankfully We've Made Copies of More Interesting Data From statCounter
If statCounter (the Web site or the 'webapp') vanished overnight, we'd still have something left of it
More Silent Layoffs at IBM/Red Hat
when the media counts such layoffs or presents tallies the numbers are very incomplete