Video download link | md5sum ee33fa5440e3ff966c0c83596b29e2ba Lowered Salaries at EPO Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: Multinational corporations and billionaires may not mind this (they profit even more; price hikes all across the board!), but the EPO is making itself extremely unattractive to much-needed researchers and it's pricing itself out of the reach of SMEs (which the EPO itself has just admitted are no more than a fifth of all patent applications)

THE number of patents granted by the EPO has plunged thanks to industrial actions, which culminated in a strike last month. The EPO is back with António Campinos where it was with Benoît Battistelli just half a decade earlier; the Office is just faking "health" by granting loads of fake patents, including a lot of European software patents.

"...for workers stationed in The Netherlands the living expenses are soaring while the EPO suspends the standard salary increase (keeping up with national inflation rates)."The document discussed above concerns the vastly lowered incentive to join the EPO; not only is there no work security anymore (5-year contracts); for workers stationed in The Netherlands the living expenses are soaring while the EPO suspends the standard salary increase (keeping up with national inflation rates).

In the words of the union:

08 April 2022 su22011hp – 0.2.1

Inflation at 11.9%

Extraordinary times request extraordinary measures – Request for intermediate salary adjustments.

Inflation is at an all-time high since the euro was launched in 1997. It is not a mere indicator anymore; it is here to hurt. The inflation index published by Eurostat for March 2022 is 7.5% for the eurozone and 11.9% for The Netherlands when compared with prices a year before on March 2021. And still growing. The trend stays worrying upwards, with no visible signs of a stabilisation, let alone a downward trend. In fact, the problem of inflation is that once established in the economy it hardly finds a downward trend. We all maybe remember efforts of European economies in the late 80s to reduce inflation levels, during a period of both long-term inflation and economic stagnation, called stagflation.

Double digit inflation figures seemed to belong to a remote past. This is no longer true. If salaries remain nominally the same while losing purchasing power, employee salaries will melt like ice in the sun. In a short period of time, salaries and pensions will be reduced to a shadow of what they are today.

EPO's management looks at this economic disaster as an opportunity to award its staff no inflation adjustment at all, using a sophisticated intellectually dishonest structured scheme which purpose is to never grant any nominal salary adjustment. Therefore, permanently eroding all career and pension prospects. EPO’s management reminds us of bankers, advertising for complex structured financial products that promise a "potential" return on investment to customers. However, the vast array of mala fide exception clauses in those investments always and hopelessly produced 0% returns at the product maturity. Sounds familiar? It is not a coincidence, knowing that our salary adjustment procedure was produced by such bankers, in order to achieve a 0% by design.

SUEPO expects in these extraordinary times, extraordinary leaders able to amend their decisions for the best of the EPO and their most valuable asset, staff.

SUEPO requests a sustainable workforce management by intermediate salary adjustments as done at the Coordinated Organisations and the EU.

Your SUEPO The Hague Committee

They are the butlers of a whole universe Lords by force lawless dispatchers They fill their pockets, drink new wine And dance around at the king's pine forest

Zeca Afonso - “Os Vampiros” (The Vampires)

The way things are going, the Office will quickly run out of people capable of doing the job it was entrusted to do. It's a disaster in the making and those who make the mess are profiting some other way. ⬆