EPO's Local Staff Committee The Hague (LSCTH): The EPO is Generally “Managed by Excel” (Microsoft)
2021: EPO and Microsoft Collude to Break the Law -- Summing Up: EPO Administrative Council Still Asleep at the Wheel (as soon as we began this series Microsoft offered a lot of money to our sysadmin; she turned them down and months later we got SLAPPed by Microsoft associates who get drunk on the job and hurt women)
The Local Staff Committee The Hague (LSCTH), not the union, has written about an online meetup scheduled to take place tomorrow, 11 days before the second strike (there will be strikes on 23 February and 19 March; last month's strike was a success and it put pressure on abusive management, as staff had hoped [1, 2])
This is the message circulated by the LSCTH yesterday:
Invitation to a General Meeting of staff
Thursday 12 February, 11.00 hrs - Salary Adjustment Procedure
Dear colleagues,
Please attend the follow-up General Assembly of the Local Staff Committee The Hague on the Salary Adjustment Procedure (SAP):
Thursday 12 February, 11.00 hrs
[...]
The Administration's proposal for the new Salary Adjustment Procedure (SAP 2027-2032) is soon to be submitted to the members of the General Consultative Committee (GCC) and will be discussed in the meeting of February 24th. The Administration have admitted that the proposed SAP does not have the maintenance of purchasing power as main objective. Despite the legally questionable grounds, the priority is given to a “sustainability mandate”, which appears to be simply fulfilling a desire to save yet more money at the expense of staff, without a proper reason to do so.
The impact of such a SAP on staff is severe, encompassing all elements of remuneration, allowances, and pensions. There is also a complete lack of justification; all financial indicators of the EPO are in the green, with pension liabilities more than covered, and the EPO, a not-for-profit organisation, generating record annual surpluses. The RFPSS currently stands at €14.7bn, with 9.7% return in 2025, and the EPOTIF at €5.3bn.
The strike of 30th January showed the highest participation rate since the beginning of the President’s mandate. The Administration is yet to make any more than negligible concessions (see here). The EPO is generally “managed by Excel”: indicators need to turn red for things to change. This means that if we want to stop the erosion of our employment conditions, revenue and granted patents need to go down and strike and litigation numbers need to go up (in the Social Report). The action plan therefore continues with Work-To-Rule and a strike on Monday 23rd of February. You can already register your strike day on MyFips where you usually register annual leave and choose as leave type “strike”. You may also use the quick link q/StrikeTool → Create Request → Leave type: Strike.
In the General Assembly of 26 January we presented these slides. The General Assembly of 12 February will be a follow-up with updates from the consultation and information on the ongoing actions.
Kind regards,
Your Local Staff Committee The Hague
In their own words: "The EPO is generally “managed by Excel”: indicators need to turn red for things to change."
When the EPO breaks the law things go "green". This too needs to change. The current management has basically defined corruption to be "success". When you break the law they give you a huge reward. It's not the sort of message that a patent office should relay to anybody if we believe it's really a "legal system". █