EPO Strike a Week From Now, After That Strikes Can Become Permanent
Published yesterday: Invitation to General Assembly After 1,200 EPO Workers Participated in the Demonstration 3 Days Ago
At the end of last week the Local Staff Committee The Hague (LSCTH) told EPO colleagues more about what it had published earlier regarding communication or mass-communications. This time, however, the message is more terse and omits what was said before. It just quotes the summary or 'abstract' of the paper: "After many years your Staff Committees can finally send emails to all staff again. In 2013, the then President limited access to email to max 50 persons, effectively rendering it impossible for your Staff Representation to send a mass email to all staff. SUEPO and the Staff Committees brought the matter before the ILO-AT, which ruled in our favour. Following this judgment, new data protection requirements were introduced by the EPO, obliging Staff Representation to use an external mailing tool and to allow staff to unsubscribe. The arrangement remains problematic because the Staff Committees do not have direct insight into the content of the mailing list, and because our messages - considered part of the normal functioning of the Office, like communications from BIT, internal services, VP1, or the President - should not be subject to an unsubscribe option."
They openly say this "arrangement remains problematic".
There are still restrictions on speech, i.e. censorship. The Office managers ("Alicante mafia" as insiders call them) are intolerant of criticism. The management "cabal" does not want staff to talk about how bad things really are.
Now back to LSCTH. They've also spread slides previously circulated by the EPO's Local Staff Committee Munich (LSCMN), but the third paragraph below was added as new or split apart from the second:
On the topic of the proposed salary adjustment procedure, many of the delegates (around 16 delegations) at the Administrative Council (AC) repeated their opinions that our salaries are too high, with little substance to support it. They also mentioned other benefits, such as teleworking, many allowances, and pension age as being too generous.
Since we were refused permission to share slides on the screens, we improvised and distributed printed handouts on every delegates desk to accompany our intervention.
The delegates listened carefully, and we left them with the question of whether the risks outlined of legal uncertainty, social unrest, reduced productivity, lower income for national offices, and weakened recruitment are worth it when the same outcome of lowering average salaries and pensions will be achieved anyway within 10 years as impact of the new career system and new pension scheme will be fully realised, without undermining staff trust or stability.
The staff representation sat yesterday in the Council with our high-visibility yellow jackets to make it clear we were on strike. We can only do so much at the Council with the limitations that are imposed to our contributions there. Therefore, we again emphasise that the most powerful action every one of us can take is to join the organised strikes and to contribute to the work-to-rule action which is having an impressive impact on the drop in number of products and hence the income of the national patent offices of the delegates.
Here again are the handout infographics:
A week from tomorrow there will be another strike. Then things will escalate some more. █