Clueless and Nontechnical EPO Management Uses the 'Great Scam' (Hey Hi Hype) to Justify Automation Where It's Both Detrimental and Illegal
The EPC has been practically set aflame; thus, the EPO has no legitimacy or reason to exist anymore
THE ATTACKS on EPO staff take more (additional) forms. Benoît Battistelli accelerated these attacks and António Campinos, a corrupt friend of Battistelli, continues these attacks while uttering buzzwords, lies, and rude words that would typically have a person in his position sacked on the spot.
But the EPO is nowadays run by a de facto Mafia (at all levels, the "courts" too). Those are basically well-connected white-collar criminals running things while insisting that their job is about upholding or enforcing laws. It's kind of like the Convicted Felon being inaugurated after insurrection by his mob. That's EPO. "Law and order" means releasing violent and dangerous people while looking to imprison perceived "opponents". Battistelli 'became' Campinos, another Frenchman who basically rigged and cheated in elections (he bribed the voters!).
Campinos belongs in prison (lots of corruption in several institutions), but this isn't how the political system works.
Aside from him pushing European software patents - i.e. patents which are both illegal and undesirable - he's also pushing "hey hi" (AI) nonsense - the same nonsense the EPO likes to use in order to shoehorn any patent on algorithms (just call it "hey hi").
"When asking more clarity about a roadmap regarding the future of staff," the Central Staff Committee of the EPO wrote some time this week, "its job stability and the quality of the work, management directs the staff representation to the Digital Pipeline 2028."
"Did we find in there the answers to these crucial issues?"
See below:
Zentraler Personalausschuss
Central Staff Committee
Le Comité Central du Personnel
Munich, 17.01.2025
sc25002cpDigital transformation – what is in there for staff?
On 19 November 2024, during the GCC meeting, the CSC once again called for a clear roadmap addressing the future of staff, the job security, and the quality of work, especially given that recruitment is at an all-time low, and digitalisation is accelerating rapidly. The management referred us to the digital-transformation intranet page and in particular to the Digital Pipeline 2028 as the document addressing concerns related to these questions. With this in mind, we present our analysis and give you the news: the document does not address these burning issues.
A holistic roadmap?
Being a digital roadmap only, the digital pipeline focuses solely on planned projects, IT tools, AI, and the decommissioning of legacy systems, but never addresses the impact these changes will have on staff, users, or other stakeholders. It leaves us to think that management assumes that as long as the technical roadmap is covered, everything else we need to handle will just fall into place. There doesn’t seem to be any plan to update us on possible challenges or supporting measures. So much for a human centric approach.
On job stability
The range of planned technological changes will reduce manual interventions (e.g., automation of notification processes, data management updates and tool integration) which will impact the roles and tasks of staff. This justifies that staff should be provided with a document explaining insights or giving conclusions regarding job content, job stability or workforce adjustments.
On the quality
There is little clarity regarding quality improvements. Management continues to emphasise the adoption of new technologies to enhance quality. While the document occasionally refers to improving "quality" (e.g., classification quality or user satisfaction), this is limited within the context of technological improvements and efficiency gains rather than evaluating the intrinsic quality of the work performed using these systems.
On the human centric approach
One of management's latest mantras is the "human-centric approach," presumably intended to reassure staff about their future work, though it remains unclear how much substance lies behind the words.
One would expect a “human-centric” pipeline to explicitly address active user involvement and feedback throughout development, as well as customisation to meet diverse user needs. We consider that the guiding principle of a human centric pipeline should be the user (i.e. staff) satisfaction and ergonomic suitability (being ergonomically fit for purpose), but we do not find any information on training, support, and change management for employees.
An open question is how AI and automation might affect fairness, accountability, or the well- being of staff. For instance, when AI makes decisions, it’s unclear who is responsible if something goes wrong.
Moreover, with roughly 60% of staff working remotely on a daily basis, we have become much more dependent on the performance and quality of the onscreen working environment. Therefore, we need to focus more on hard- and software ergonomics to be defined in a new digital wellbeing policy, in line with the recent recommendations by the COHSEC members nominated by the CSC.
Same questions standing
While the document provides a roadmap for planning and scheduling initiatives, as expected from a digital pipeline, it does not give cues about the future work of staff. What the administration has still not told to staff is how their future at the EPO is going to look like and how the colleagues are going to be accompanied through these changes. The communication of the administration keeps implying that changes go seamlessly and heavily relies on the resilience of staff. We still miss answers to the following questions:
• How will the administration ensure job stability for staff affected by automation?
• Will there be channels for staff to provide feedback on the effectiveness and challenges of automation?
• How will the organisation ensure that automation enhances, rather than undermines, em- ployee satisfaction?
• What if automation/AI does not deliver the expected quality and the majority of the knowl- edgeable staff has already left the office?
Conclusion
The digital pipeline is a useful tool in that it provides an overview of the digital transformation timeline and clarity on the upcoming technical changes, but it does not consider critical human and quality factors.
Therefore, the administration must not cut corners by omitting to draw a human and quality focused roadmap which colleagues absolutely need in view of the massive changes ahead of them.
The Central Staff Committee
The EPO quit caring about what's legal or what benefits science. At this point the only way to end this injustice is to shut the EPO down (if the management cannot be detained, then replaced entirely). The EPO only contributes as an existential risk to the EU as a whole. █