Report on the General Assembly by the EPO's Staff Committee The Hague

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 17, 2024

HOURS ago the EPO's local Staff Committee The Hague released a "Report on the General Assembly of Tuesday 6 February". The report mainly compromises presentations given that day, but here's their overview, which was circulated/sent to staff:

Dear colleagues,
 
On Tuesday 6 February, over 600 colleagues^[1] followed the hybrid General Assembly 2024 of the Local Staff Committee The Hague (LSCTH).
 
We would like to thank everybody for their participation and for submitting questions during the event. Links to the presented slides can be found below:

• Introduction & reminders

• Recruitment & Job groups 5&6

• Objective setting

• Reminder appraisal reports

• Update on Salary Adjustment Procedure (SAP)

• Update on New Pension Scheme (NPS) litigation 

The General Assembly voted in favour of a resolution on objective setting with an overwhelming majority:

• 491 in favour^[2],

• 27 against^[3] and

• 30 abstentions^[4].

The resolution urges the EPO management to:

• implement genuine bottom-up planning which takes into account the input of staff, the true available work capacity and the time needed for peripheral but essential tasks (training, chairing, classification, etc.);

• increase recruitment of staff, especially performing core tasks (examiners and formalities officers);

• reinstate a robust and genuine quality management (DQA);

• revise the career and performance management systems to transparently recognize, incentivise and reward delivering EPC compliant, legally sound patents; and

• prioritize the task of the organisation to grant legally sound patents meeting the requirements of the EPC.

 We would also like to point to the slides of the following presentations by the Local Staff Committee Munich (LSCMN) which might be of interest:

• Quality – Can it be put back on the EPO agenda?

• Career Judgments – What happened? What next?

We thank the colleagues for their continued engagement with and support for their staff representatives. 
 
Kind regards,

Your Local Staff Committee The Hague - LSCTH

 
1. Attendance: 603 online + 78 auditorium = 681
2. Votes in favour: 416 online + 75 auditorium = 491
3. Votes against: 27 online + 0 auditorium = 27
4. Abstentions: 27 online + 3 auditorium = 30

Over the next few days or perhaps this coming week we'll show and comment on the presentations given. There's a severe problem at hand, and it was very much deliberate (Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos don't know how to run a patent office; they never did patent examination before). In the minds of the people who run the EPO, the sole goal is to grant as many patents as possible, including software patents. They break the rules to get there. █