The EPO's General Consultative Committee (GCC) Discussion Illuminates How Much Worse Things Have Gotten ("on Strike and Participated in the 'Meeting'")
Last night: Over 1,500 EPO Workers Went on Strike Last Week
The EPO is going through a period of unrest unprecedented in the António Campinos tenure, which he buys by bribing the people who vote for him. It's an autocracy based around corruption in Europe's largest patent office and second-largest institution overall. A once-respectable institution has become a laughing stock. People are barely proud to work there anymore and the validity/legality of many European Patents has never been worse. They are faking growth as a matter of policy. The decision is made by unqualified people who just happen to have connections. "Report on the GCC meeting [sic] of 30 January 2026," as those who wrote about it later put it, was published many days afterwards. Preparation of this document was done by attendants after a "videoconference on 30 January 2026".
For some background, on the day of the first strike (about a month ago) a videoconference - not a physical meeting - discussed EPO policies after an exchange of E-mails with charts and tables.
The Central Staff Committee GCC minutes include this chart, which relates to what we published yesterday:
The overview of the long document, as per the CSC:
On the agenda: Reward Exercise 2026, New pension transfer coefficients and Office-wide reorganisation
Dear Colleagues,
The General Consultative Committee (GCC) met by videoconference on 30 January 2026. The following items were on the agenda of the meeting and the CSC members of the GCC raised their concerns and tried to get further clarifications:
General guidelines on rewards 2026 - for consultation GCC/DOC 01/2026
Circ. 390 - New transfer coefficients (Art.12 of the Pension Scheme Regulations and new Pension Scheme Regulations) - for consultation GCC/DOC 02/2026
Office-wide organisational adjustments - stream 2 - for information GCC/DOC 03/2026
The CSC members in the GCC declared themselves on strike and participated in the meeting.
In any other business, the CSC members in the GCC alerted the administration on the controversial and ill-designed proposal on the salary adjustment procedure planned to be tabled in the next meeting of 19 February.
"The detailed opinions by the CSC members of the GCC are annexed to this paper," said the CSC. Here's the full PDF. █
Image source: A Midsummer-Night Dream: Act IV, Scene 1: Titania: Come set thee down upon this flowery bed