Commission strikers to lose a day’s pay

Date: 10/09/1998

By Rory Watson

EUROPEAN Commission officials who held a 24-hour strike earlier this year are to have a full day's pay deducted from their salaries.

It is the first time that EU officials have been ordered to meet the total cost of industrial action from their own pockets. The new hardline approach has been unanimously endorsed by Commission President Jacques Santer and his fellow Commissioners despite opposition from the staff unions.

The deductions will be made from either the October or November pay-packets of the two-thirds or so of Commission staff who went on strike on 30 April, just 24 hours before the start of the historic European summit in Brussels which gave the go-ahead to the single currency.

Supporters of the decision believe that it is symbolically highly important. In the past, a complex formula tended to be negotiated between the Commission and the unions to calculate penalties following any industrial action.

After the last major strike in 1991, this resulted in a combination of special overtime or the sacrifice of some holiday entitlement, instead of the straight salary deductions which are standard practice in the public and private sector throughout the Union.

One of the difficulties previously encountered in imposing penalties for industrial action has been in accurately identifying which individuals had answered the staff unions' call to strike.

This time, the administration sent a questionnaire to all Commission staff asking them to indicate if they were ill, on leave or on strike. Any one who failed to respond was considered to have taken part in the industrial action.

Equally significant, from the administration's point of view, is the fact that the Commission rejected the unions' argument that the question of salary deductions could not even be broached until all the elements of the agreement which lifted the threat of further industrial action were in place.

One of these was the creation of a working party, under the Commission's former Secretary-General David Williamson, to investigate possible reforms of the institution's personnel policy and report back by the end of next month.

The day-long strike was called by the six leading unions representing Commission staff in protest at what they insisted was a breakdown in confidence between themselves and their employer.

In particular, they argued that there had been a lack of consultation over moves to amend the employment and working conditions of Commission employees.

The final trigger for the stoppage was the discovery of an informal discussion paper drawn up by a senior official in the Commission's Directorate-General for personnel (DGIX) which floated a range of ideas - some radical, others less so - for updating the institution's staffing policy.