Sickness interferes with corporate profits! STOP GETTING SICK AND GO BACK TO WORK!

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Summary: Sickness-related rights of staff are being weakened or abolished and staff representatives caution national representatives to prevent that from exacerbating even further

The Central Staff Committee (CSC) of the EPO has circulated this recent letter with many annexes added underneath. [PDF] (No metadata in it that contains names)

The document (letter and a lot more, even E-mails) concerns sickness/illness. In times of pandemic not only do many people get ill; some suffer long-lasting agony (e.g. "long COVID") and deserve sympathy from their employer. Myself and my wife worked (a combined) 21 years for the same employer without ever taking any sick leave, yet the employer treated us very badly. Imagine how much worse if would be if we asked for a day off due to bad health.

In the EPO, the situation is further complicated because when rights of staff are weakened that necessarily translates into an inability to recruit high-calibre people who can properly judge patent applications. As the video above notes, everyone in Europe will suffer from that as corporations will receive more fake patents (some large stakeholders already complain out in the open about the collapse of patent quality at the EPO).

Here's a communication to staff, dated yesterday, about the document above:

Letter to AC delegations: Detrimental adjustment to the health services (CA/85/22)

Dear colleagues,

The President tabled a reform of the health services (CA/85/22) for the meeting of the Administrative Council on 13-14 December 2022, which will further restrict the rights of sick staff.

In this open letter, we explain to the heads of delegation how the upcoming reform will supplement the 2015 reform and further harm the most vulnerable category of staff, sick staff, and urge them not to adopt document CA/85/22.

The key part is the letter, not the annexes, so we're reproducing it below as HTML, GemText, and plain text:

European Patent Office | 80298 MUNICH | GERMANY

Heads of Delegation in the Administrative Council By email

OPEN LETTER

centralSTCOM@epo.org Reference: sc22147cl Date: 09/12/2022

Detrimental adjustment to the health services (CA/85/22)

Dear Heads of Delegation,

The President has tabled a reform of the health services (CA/85/22) for the upcoming meeting of the Administrative Council which will further restrict the rights of sick staff.

The 2015 reform of sick leave and invalidity had already negatively affected staff and is currently under legal challenge:

− the computation of sick leave, where any part-time absence on a working day is counted as a full day of sick leave, is prejudicial to staff entering or in extended sick leave or (partial) incapacity because it resulted in them suffering salary deductions, unlike other staff (e.g. in the case of Covid-19 infections).

− the abolition of the invalidity lump sum insurance has violated the legitimate expectations of EPO staff who had been contributing to the insurance for many years. The Office did not follow the unanimous opinion of the Appeals Committee in favour of staff, leaving them no other option than to challenge the decision before the Tribunal right in the middle of the pandemic.

− the abolition of a medical committee, which previously had a balanced composition, paved the way for an unbalanced procedure fully empowering the medical practitioner (medical advisor) chosen by the President of the Office alone for the purpose of issuing medical opinions on incapacity.

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The Health Services should not be merged

The Health Services are currently organised in two separate teams:

1) an Occupational Health Service (OHS) responsible for staff on sick leave (less than 125 days in 18 consecutive months) and providing advice and support to staff members,

2) a Medical Advisory Unit (MAU) responsible for staff on sick leave for more than 125 days in 18 consecutive months and issuing opinions for the President for the purpose of taking potentially adverse administrative decisions (e.g. salary deductions, forced return to work...).

The proposed reform pretends to introduce “a seamless sick leave process” by merging the two teams. In our view, a sick staff member cannot build trust with the practitioner supposed to support them if this same practitioner is also actively involved in making potentially adverse decisions. Moreover, independence is at risk as the practitioner will find himself in an inherent conflict of interest. Such a reform would even be illegal in our major host country, Germany, as confirmed by the Mercer Marsh Benefits report.

Data protection issues

As a consequence of the reform, the two separate medical case management systems of OHS and MAU would be merged. It was an inherent strength of the system that medical data was accessed by different persons for different purposes: one to support staff, the other one (only if required) to be involved in making adverse decisions. The merge would increase the number of “health professionals” and administrative support staff who have access to the medical data of all staff, without asking the staff member for their consent.

In addition, the Staff Committee was never informed about how the Data Protection Officer has been involved.

Amendments in the Service Regulations outside the scope of the Working Group and not discussed

The document presents amendments to the Service Regulations allegedly to support implementation of “a seamless sick leave process”. None of the amendments were necessary for this purpose. Nor were they within the scope of the Working Group set up to discuss the reorganisation of the health services and were not discussed.

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In particular:

− allowing the EPO medical practitioner to contact the employee’s doctor without their consent is a violation of the employee’s right to privacy and a blank check for violation of medical secrecy,

- the use of personal medical data for other purposes without the employee’s consent breaches data protection,

- the employee’s right to access medical data is now restricted,

- the establishment of new conditions for disregarding evidence voluntarily submitted by the employee deprives them of the possibility of handling their own medical situation in front of the employer,

- the employee’s access to the arbitration procedure in case of disagreement with a medical opinion is now restricted.

More details can be found in our opinion in the General Consultative Committee of 22 November 2022, which is annexed to this letter.

Conclusion

The proposed reform is detrimental to staff, endangers the independence of the “health professionals”, endangers medical secrecy and risks creating an atmosphere of mistrust. It would be illegal in our major host country, Germany. Furthermore, the reform introduces, after the 2015 reform, further restrictions on the rights of sick staff, raising the question of whether the health and well-being of staff is the priority for the EPO.

For the sake of sick staff, we urge the Council not to approve document CA/85/22.

Yours sincerely,

Alain Dumont Chairman of the Central Staff Committee

Annex: Opinion of the CSC members of the GCC on GCC/DOC 27/2022: Adjustments to health services (CA/85/22)

Based on constitutions and international conventions (on human rights), some staff protections are not negotiable. But the EPO believes that because it is in "no-man's land" it is free to violate people's fundamental rights as if there's no consequence to be feared.

Patent examiners at the EPO are besieged by corrupt management, appointed and supported by rogue law firms and monopolies. Many of these aren't even European, so they actively work to undermine Europe's interests and the triumph of scientific advancement (they want profit, not progress). This imperils the world, not only Europe. ⬆