Little enthusiasm for state controls over Union staff

Date: 05/06/1997

By Rory Watson

GERMAN plans to introduce stronger national controls on the salaries and working conditions of EU officials now look likely to be shelved.

Attempts by Bonn to use the Intergovernmental Conference on treaty reform to change the way internal regulations on the conduct and income of Union employees are adopted have not only been denounced by staff unions, but have also failed to win sufficient support among member states.

“Union ambassadors discussed Germany's proposal over lunch last week and it was clear there was not enough enthusiasm for it. It now looks dead in the water,” said one senior official closely involved in the IGC talks.

Indeed, there have even been suggestions that the move to curb the salaries of EU fonctionnaires, which first emerged from within the German parliament, did not enjoy Chancellor Helmut Kohl's full backing and thus had insufficient political momentum to get off the ground.

The lack of member state support has meant that the idea has not yet been formally discussed by IGC negotiators, although German sources are confident that it will still surface in the final run-up to the Amsterdam summit.

Germany's European Affairs Minister Werner Hoyer took many of his EU colleagues by surprise late last month when he suggested that the Union's 1965 Merger Treaty should be changed to allow member states to put forward their own proposals for amending the staff regulations and to adopt these by majority vote.

The idea that changes could be triggered without a formal Commission proposal was immediately seen by staff unions as a direct attack on EU officials' salaries and terms of employment. They have since voiced their concerns in meetings with Commission President Jacques Santer and Dutch European Affairs Minister Michiel Patijn.

Although the chances of the idea being turned into legal reality in the current IGC now appear slim, a number of governments are sympathetic to the German initiative.

In new member states, such as Finland and Sweden, there have been regular bursts of public outrage over the fact that middle-ranking Union officials earn more than national premiers.

With a tight rein being applied to public sector pay in many countries, some governments believe that domestic protests will be more muted if similar controls are seen to be imposed on EU salaries.

But, equally, the thought that Union governments in the Council of Ministers would have to replace the Commission in painstaking talks with staff unions over complex employment matters has been a strong argument against Hoyer's initiative.

Now that the idea has been formally raised, it is unlikely to disappear completely and may be revived at a future IGC on treaty reform. That possibility may help the Personnel Commissioner Erkki Liikanen to steer through his own plan for radical administrative and staff reforms.