Discussion About the State of Workers' Safeguards (and About the European Patent Office)
A lot of what we cover about the EPO is applicable to all workers in Europe if not worldwide (to some extent, even outside international organisations)
THE issues associated with "Modern Slavery" don't quite apply to EPO staff because the long-term staff (veterans) should be considered relatively well paid, albeit overworked, just like some Debian Developers.
The recent General Assembly covered many of the toxic and illegal legacies of Benoît Battistelli and his friend António Campinos, who decided to open the software patents floodgates to fake "production". In the past couple of months we wrote about labour issues ranging from a lack of justice to censorship (USF added its voice to that), discrimination, and financial issues. We recently covered a case where staff with disabilities or incapacity was punished financially, but everybody is affected by these 'reforms', e.g. through the 'New Pension Scheme' (NPS).
Speaking of the NPS, this is being challenged by the staff union, SUEPO, but it can take a long time to properly address due to the slowness of ILOAT, a labour tribunal in Geneva.
To quote SUEPO:
NPS Contributions Rate - ILOAT
Dear SUEPO member,
SUEPO is working on filing a complaint to the Tribunal for the following dossier RI-2018-058 concerning the New Pension Scheme (NPS) contributions rate.
The decision of the Office was delivered to the Appellants on the 28 July 2023. The deadline to file the complaint is 90 days after receiving the decision of the Office, i.e. 26 October 2023.
That was earlier this winter. When an outcome is received, at great cost to the complainants, perhaps we'll have a lot more to say.
Speaking for myself, as a victim of pension fraud (like my colleagues), these issues matter a great deal. Based on calls that I recorded and published last year (speaking to several pension schemes in the UK), a lot of this system is a massive fraud, making promises about a very distant future while worrying about its own financial sustainability just a few years down the line. One might argue that putting one's savings in a pension scheme is not more risky than putting it in banks (that use the money for lending, not gambling on the stock market), but that's another kind of discussion, centered around risk relativism. █