The reporter Contents 1. Editorial page 2 2. Opinion on the new career at the EPO page 2 3. What social dialogue page 3 4. How should the EPO navigate? page 4 5. Membership application form page 6 November 2014-1 -
1. Editorial As the summer ended and the sun made place for rainclouds and mist so did the atmosphere at the EPO change as well. We got presentations about a newly designed career-system which appears to come straight from the drawing table and is presented to us without there having been any kind of meaningful negotiation with any of the social partners. We have a staff committee and we have unions but it appears to us that no one has given any feedback on the proposal and/or their opinion has not even been asked. However it is nevertheless ready to go straight to the council. We see many problems with this system at the horizon some of which are described in the article hereunder. FFPE is worried that the modus operandi for the career system is going to be the trend for the next years and that is a very worrying trend! Just last week FFPE-EPO was told it had precisely 5 working days to evacuate the room we were using on the 25 th floor. Even the tone of the letter wasn t nice anymore which is highly unusual in the EPO. Where do we go from here? Nobody knows but one thing should be clear, FFPE-EPO has always pleaded for a proper negotiation channel through a framework agreement between unions and management and has always stated that the current status of ignoring one another is neither good nor professional. Since FFPE-EPO cannot publish any more through internal paper means it has become harder for us to get our message through but we will find new ways to get the message across and keep you informed of our activities. 2. Opinion on the new career at the EPO Recently our managers have explained to us the new career system that the EPO management has designed, to be applied to everybody starting from 2016. Many of our colleagues are worried about this new system which appears not to have been negotiated and which seems to reduce considerably the career prospects of especially younger staff members. FFPE shares these worries and has others as well which have to do with recruitment of qualified and multilingual staff, retaining competent and fully trained new staff and motivation of staff in place. What has changed? To begin we enumerate the essential changes to the career system: Steps in grade increases The new career system will be much less based on seniority as the current one. The current system has no less than 13 steps in each grade which is a reward for seniority. The new system however will be much more rewarding past performance. In the new system a good or very good producer will probably get his deserved yearly or biannual step increase while the average or below average producer might have to wait for a while to get it. This has a big influence on salary development in the EPO. If people are stuck for a long time in the same grade and step because they are average or slightly below target, various emotions like frustrations, distrust, and jealousy will grow and have a detrimental effect on team work and directorate performance. Let s not forget that in the end the bulk of the work is done by average examiners and not by the few very high producers. FFPE fears also that putting a lot of pressure on the average examiner might increase sick leave! Promotions Promotions will be based upon the reports which focus on consistently doing the required production over a long period of time and doing additional duties. The criteria for promotion become thereby much more subjective. In the current system even someone who was average and did his work but without much extra investments in extra duties could more or less count on a promotion date based on his reports and his years in the EPO. A typical examiner could count on an A4 promotion after - 2 -
more or less 20 years in the EPO. In the new system there is no such guarantee. On the contrary, the likelihood is high that newcomers might be stuck in the lowest grade for quite some time because older colleagues are awaiting promotions and get priority. This could lead to the best recruits leaving the EPO after only a few years of service, during which the office has substantially invested in training. This could have a negative effect on the EPO s training budget. A promotion is always a reward for past performance, not for future performance! A probation period for a promotion does not make sense if the job description has not changed and the person is still doing the same job. If you weren t sure that someone was good at doing his job why did you promote him in the first place? Previous experience There are reasons to reward at least partially previous experience. The main reason is that someone with experience in the patent world is cheaper to train and has a higher likelihood to be fit for the job. These advantages should be rewarded so that the EPO can count on a steady flow of high quality candidates. A patent attorney joining the EPO should therefore have his previous experience taken into account at least in part. As for other recruits the EPO would be wise to take into account experience where it is relevant for the function that is foreseen. An electrical engineer with years of experience in an electrical company applying to an examiner post in his working field should have this relevant experience taken into account at least partially. FFPE-EPO therefore pleads for a case by case analysis whether taking into account experience is beneficial or not for the EPO. In the clear cut cases where it is beneficial it would not be wise to completely discard previous experience. Current colleagues It seems that the EPO wants to transfer all the current employees into the new system. Although from a managerial point of view this does make sense, from a legal point of view it seems unwise to do this without a legal arrangement between employee and employer. For example, just transferring colleagues who are at the end of the new scale will curtail the employee s reasonable short term expectations for step increases, if he is currently not promotable. It is foreseeable that this will lead to a multitude of appeals at ILO by colleagues in a big variety of situations. If the administrative council really insists on implementing this reform at the EPO it would be wise to implement the IIB solution which means that current employees should keep the old system. Alternatively or complementary the EPO could offer a financial compensation for those employees accepting a transfer into the new system and renouncing to appeal. Finally any transfer into the new scale will have to mean being transferred up and never down! To conclude we see that the new career system looks a lot like the EU career reform from 2004. This was of course expected for a long time. When implementing this reform it would be wise for the EPO to avoid making the same mistakes made at the EU and to avoid the many legal problems with staff in place. FFPE-EPO therefore hopes that wisdom will prevail and that the EPO s attractiveness as an employer is not put in danger. 3. What social dialogue? In a recent joint communiqué of VP4 and VP5 1 the office complains about the delays in the internal appeals procedure. Apparently, the delays are caused by staff filing these appeals. The CSC is indeed responsible for filing a big part of the appeals, this because they filed them on behalf of staff we would say. The office considers this unjust as the appeals are against general decisions taken by 1 http://my.internal.epo.org/portal/private/epo/organisation/dg4/?wcm_global_context=/epo/intra net/organisation/dg4/vp4/announcements/2014/1412095173469_functioning_of_the_settlement_of_di sputes_system - 3 -
the management. These decisions -general in nature- are not considered to harm the complainants individually. Well, they do! On top of harming one staff member they harm all staff members! These actions by CSC are considered unlawful based on an ATILO decision. We believe that ATILO considered that you should not be able to protest against general decisions as you had the opportunity to discuss them before the decision was taken. Indeed, in a normal organization this would be the case. But there is nothing normal about the EPO. Also VP4 and VP5 consider in their joint attack on the reputation of the staff representatives that there is a social dialogue before a decision is taken. We wonder when such a dialogue actually took place. Maybe we should ask VP4 and VP5 when they witnessed such dialogues. According to us, dialogue not only means talking but also listening. As a result of such a process, amendments to proposals should generally be made, resulting in a decision supported by staff. This seems important because last time we checked it was the staff who do the work of the office. Taking decisions not supported by said staff (i.e. having no respect for their opinion) results in reduced motivation. This is something money does not compensate for. Interestingly, not signing a decision of the Internal Appeal committee slows down the system. How can this be true? It slows down providing the decision. We cannot imagine that you fail to take on the next case because the previous one has not been signed yet. The current system which has the funny name dispute settlement system almost never settles any dispute. A revolutionary alternative to this system is to prevent decisions which will be appealed. A further step could be to allow the managerial review to decide more in favour of the complainant. With respect to transparency, it would be nice to have some statistics on the results of the managerial review procedure. So far the image by staff is: once a wrong decision is taken by the office it will not be changed anymore. Knowing that the office doesn t listen to you is even worse than delays in legal processes. 4. How should the EPO navigate in a difficult situation? One may have noticed the relative silence of FFPE-EPO in the last few months. It is clear that the staff of the EPO faces the most difficult situation that EPO staff has ever faced in the last few decades. A new career and many other changes are being put in place. Trade unions have their facilities, both meeting rooms and printing facilities for journals like FFPE- Reporter and SUEPO Observer, being taken away from them. Never before has the situation been so tense at the EPO as it is now. What is going on? The new career system looks quite a lot like the career system which has been introduced 10 years ago in the European Union. It was in a way unavoidable that sooner or later it would be introduced at the EPO as well. It was only a matter of time. It is true that the EU and the EPO have different sources of income, and that the EPO has enough money to stay with the old system. The fact that the EPO has a very specific source of income may not always justify a staff regulation which is different than what other Organizations have, or to put it differently: if we don't like this career system, we should have stopped its introduction in the EU 10 years ago. 10 years ago, it was Union Syndicale, to which SUEPO is affiliated, which negotiated with the Commission on this new career. It must be noted that SUEPO seemed to support this new career at the level of the EU institutions. Other trade unions, like FFPE, did not support the introduction of this new career at the EU. It should be noted that the EPO is not the only European Organization which derives its income from private companies. The other European Organization which is financially self- supporting is Eurocontrol, which derives its income from airline route taxes. Eurocontrol has a tendency to copy the EU staff regulations to the extent that this is possible, so when the EU reformed its staff regulations - 4 -
10 years ago, so did Eurocontrol. It is not that we are so happy with the new rules, but it is our duty to inform you about global trends. The EPO is not an island. Turning now to the global climate in the EPO, it should be noted that the role of staff unions in the EU is first of all to develop their own vision on staff policy and to negotiate with the employer. There is nearly always an "accord cadre", agreement on relations between the trade unions and the management, which covers the existence of trade unions within the EU organization. At the EPO this has never been the case. At the EPO, with its single trade union until 6 years ago, this was not deemed necessary. SUEPO preferred to exist without agreement on relations, and as they continuously filled up all the seats in the staff committee, they could use staff committee facilities. It looks like the office is on a confrontation course with trade unions, but this is also to be seen against the background that the biggest trade union was not able to or not willing to come to an agreement with the management on its existence on EPO premises. SUEPO has had for decades a de facto existence, but not an official existence. A situation which they have also abused regularly, by taking decisions behind closed doors (education allowance, seat agreement) or by spreading incorrect information to staff (institutional rents). The assertion that we heard now and then that SUEPO is acting like a state within a state is not far from the truth. FFPE-EPO is not happy with this climate of confrontation which is being created both by the office management as well as by SUEPO, but we also feel that to a certain extent SUEPO has to blame themselves. We have reported at federal FFPE level the existence of flexi strikes at the EPO, but no other FFPE section in any other organization had ever seen such a method of organizing strikes. The reply by EPO management, introducing a new strike regulation, was equally unheard of. We now see one strike initiative being launched after the other under the new strike regulation, every time with a vague list of claims, while certain concrete items, such as the EPO education allowance for all staff are systematically left out. We never know the initiators of the strike initiatives, but in case it would indeed be SUEPO, it shows SUEPOs determination to represent only particular slices of EPO staff and not others. This is not the approach of model trade unions in a model international organization. FFPE-EPO has been set up 6 years ago to propose an alternative route in the relations between the office and its staff, and especially to give a more democratic basis to staff representation in the EPO by providing a choice to EPO staff. "Mehr Demokratie wagen" as Willy Brandt would say, but unfortunately EPO staff seems to prefer a unitary trade union, which is neither willing to nor able to create a legal framework for its existence at the EPO, and without legal framework for the existence of trade unions at the EPO, such as the accord cadre at the EU, there will be no facilities for trade unions at the EPO. It is hard to say this but there is no legal obligation for the office to provide such facilities. FFPE-EPO will still be there at the EPO in the future, trying to fill the gaps. It is up to staff to discover that a unitary trade union is not the answer to the needs of staff at the EPO. FFPE-EPO does not feel it is our role to weaken the staff representation in these times of difficult discussions with the management. On the other hand we also note the determination by SUEPO not to tolerate a second trade union at the EPO. The SUEPO voting "advice" to staff how to fill all the seats of the staff committee was a clear demonstration of this fact. - 5 -
FFPE-EPO MEMBERSHIP APPLICATION FORM Mr. Ms. Surname: First name and initials: Room number: if not in TH please indicate site Office email: Grade: e.g. C3, B4, A1 It is not obligatory to provide the three items of information below - they are intended to serve for communication and/or statistical purposes only Date of birth: Date of entry into the EPO: Private email: I, the undersigned, declare that I wish to become member of FFPE-EPO. Date: Name: Signature: Please complete and return to FFPE-EPO, room S05-C02 (Shell, TH). Membership fees for 2015 are set at Euro 40, - for grades C1-C6, B1-B5 and A1, and Euro 80, - for others. You will get an invitation to pay in due course. - 6 -